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STUDIES IN THE BOOK OF JOB 

A BIBLICAL DRAMA 



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Studies in the Book of Job 

A BIBLICAL DRAMA ILLUMINATING THE 
PROBLEM OF THE ACES 



FOR ADVANCED CLASSES IN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL, FOR BIBLICAL 

LITERATURE COURSES IN HIGH SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES, 

FOR EVENING SERVICES, AND FOR INDIVIDUAL USE 



BY 

REV. FRANCIS N. PELOUBET, D.D. 

Author of "Select Notes on the International Lessons," 
"The Teacher's Commentary on Acts," etc. 



New York 

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1906 






U8RARY of CONGRESS 
Two Cooles Received 

SEP 1 1906 

Copyright entry 
CLASS /£t XXc. No 



Copyright, 1906, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published, September, 1906 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



GENERAL PLAN 



READINGS IN CHARACTER. A FULL BIBLIOGRAPHY. 

REFERENCES FOR BIBLE STUDY. 

BLACKBOARD DIAGRAMS. 

SUGGESTIVE ILLUSTRATIONS AND APPLICATIONS. 

TOPICS FOR RESEARCH AND DISCUSSION. 

BRIEF NOTES ON DIFFICULT AND STRIKING PASSAGES. 



Points of Contact with Daily Life, Literature, 

and History — Scholarly, Spiritual, 

Educational, Devotional. 



This is the cry- 
That echoes through the wilderness of earth, 
Through song and sorrow, day of death and birth 
• Why ? ' 

It is the high 

Wail of the child with all his life to face, 

Man's last dumb question as he reaches space: 

'Why?'" 



PREFACE 

The lessons in this book and the method of presenting the subject have 
grown out of actual experience. It has been tested in the class room and found 
to create a deep interest, to meet the needs of many souls, and to give a new 
vision of its beauty and power. 

I am led the more earnestly to commend the study of the Book of Job, be- 
cause its subject has to do with all classes and conditions of men, and because 
of my own experience in connection with it. I had, of course, read it many 
times, but during my earlier ministry I sympathized with Macaulay's words con- 
cerning Milton's " Paradise Lost " as applying equally to the Book of Job, that 
it was "the most admired and least read of all poems," and I did not under- 
stand how such men as Tennyson and Daniel Webster could regard it as "the 
greatest poem in all literature." 

But a combination of circumstances led to a study of the book which opened 
my eyes to its wonderful poetic structure, its dramatic situations, its bursts 
of eloquence, its literary gems, its spiritual insight, its use of every known 
poetic form. 

"Then felt I like some watcher of the sky 
When a new planet swims into his ken." 

So that it is easy to accept Carlyle's dictum, in his "Hero as Prophet," that 
the Book of Job is "one of the grandest things ever written with pen. . . . 
There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary 
merit." Professor Moulton, in his introduction to Job in his " Modern Reader's 
Bible" expresses this opinion: "If a jury of persons well instructed in litera- 
ture were impanelled to pronounce upon the question, 'What is the greatest 
poem in the world's great literatures,' while on such a question unanimity 
would be impossible, yet I believe a large majority would give their verdict in 
favor of . . . the Book of Job." Froude looks forward to the day "when, per- 
haps, the Book of Job will be seen towering up alone far ab<pve all the poetry 
of the world." 

The criticai questions concerning the book — its age, date, author or authors, 
method of composition or growth, later additions versus unity, place in the 
religious history of Israel — have not been neglected. Abundant references 
have been given where these discussions may be found by all who wish to make 
a thorough study of them. But the main emphasis has been placed on the book 



viii PREFACE 

as it is now, on the inspiring, invigorating, transforming, comforting teachings 
found therein. It is not the history of the violin we here want, but the music. 

The aim is to enable the members of an ordinary class to receive the full 
impression the Book of Job was written to produce: 

To awaken fresh interest in the book itself. 

To open doors to its greatness and glory as literature. 

To open windows to its blessed and comforting truths. 

To bring its consolations to the perplexed and suffering. 

To apply its character-forming elements and power. 



CONTENTS 



EACH OF THE GREAT DIVISIONS MAY BE USED FOR ONE OR FOR 
SEVERAL LESSONS, ACCORDING TO CIRCUMSTANCES. 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION xviii 

The Problem. 

Its Relation to Faith in God as Good. 

Its Relation to the Sufferings of Good Men. 

The Literary Form — a Poem. 

An Epic of the Inner Life. 

Unity and Method of Composition. 

Critical Views. 

Age and Date. 

Relation to Other Scriptures. 

Structure of the Book. 



PART I.— The Test 

Historical Situation. 

Character of Job. 

Why Afflictions Came to Job. 

The Adversary. 

His Power over Men. 

Relation of God to Trouble. 

The Two Sources of Job's Afflictions. 

The Solution—^ Test. 



x CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PART II.— Punishment .20 

The Scene. 

Characteristics of the Three Friends. 

Readings in Character. 

The Three Cycles of Speeches. 

The Argument. 

Tendency to Judge Others. 

Light from the Scriptures. 

Illustrations from Literature. 

The Solution — Punishment. 

PART III.— Discipline 64 

Character of Elihu. 
Readings from His Speech. 
The Argument. 
The School of Life. 
Tribulation. 

Discipline, Chastisement. 
Teachings of Scripture. 
The Solution — Discipline. 

PART IV.— Faith 79 

The Coming of the Storm. 

Readings from Elihu. 

The Shekinah in the Storm. 

The Voice from the Whirlwind. 

Readings. 

Wisdom, Power, and Goodness of God. 

Completer Knowledge in Jesus Christ. 

The Effect upon Job. 

The Solution — Trust in God. 



CONTENTS xi 

PAGE 

PART V.— Final Success -97 

The Divine Approval of Job. 
The Turning of His Captivity. 
Sacrifice and Prayer. 

The Four Rewards of Job : character, pros- 
perity, power of usefulness, eternal life. 
Rewards versus Wages. 
Outward Symbols of Spiritual Rewards. 
Scripture Teachings. 
The Solution — Final Success. 



FOREWORD TO TEACHERS 

The Book of Job lends itself to every form of teaching, whether by lecture 
or question and answer or formal reports or mutual investigation and conver- 
sation. There is no best way for all teachers and all classes. The same teacher 
can often wisely use more than one method. Some form of question and answer 
is usually most effective; but do not be misled by those who say that "lecturing 
is not teaching," provided you can lecture so interestingly as to set your scholars 
to thinking. Most of the education of adults comes this way. 

The wise teacher will utilize every possible means of making the truth 
clearer, more vivid, more impressive, more interesting. And there is scarcely 
one out of the whole range of methods which cannot be successfully employed 
in teaching the Book of Job. 

Organized Classes. — Of the first importance for holding, enlarging and 
obtaining the most benefit from a class, is a simple organization with presi- 
dent, secretary and treasurer and various committees. The invitation to 
become a member is extended by personal visit or by postal cards. Lists are 
made of those who are willing to take part in one way or another. 

Some are willing to be called upon at any time without notice. 

Some will make researches and report verbally or in writing. 

Some are glad to come provided no questions are asked them. 

All are welcome to ask questions at any time. 

Readings in Character. — Job, because of its dramatic form and its dis- 
cussions, is peculiarly adapted to this use in the class. The reading of the dia- 
logues in the first two chapters by different persons, each representing one of 
the characters, and still more the reading by representative characters of selec- 
tions from the discussions between Job and his friends giving the gist of the 
arguments, will give a fresh interest and new meaning to the discussion, beyond 
any previous expectation. It has been well said that no one has received the 
full power of the Scriptures till he has had the experience of their vocal inter- 
pretation. And whoever has had the privilege of hearing Professor Moulton, 
of Chicago, or Professor Duxbury, of Manchester, England, will realize the 
truth of this statement. In this book as much of the longer speeches has been 
given as can be used in the class hour, or the evening service. Should there 
be, however, a chance for a fuller reading it would be of great value. 

Blackboard Designs. — Either on a blackboard, or window-shades, or 
strips of heavy wrapping paper, there should be made a simple scheme of the 
structure of the whole book, to be kept before the class during the course. And 



FOREWORD TO TEACHERS xiii 

in addition the structure of the several divisions of the book should be given 
as each one is studied. These hold the attention, make clear the truth and 
fasten it in the memory. 

Different Versions. — There is no small advantage in several members 
of the class having different versions before them, and noting the clearer mean- 
ings and better forms, and new views which thus come to light. The Revisions, 
English and American, give more new light on Job than on most of the other 
Old Testament books, in addition to their arrangement of the poetry in poetic 
form. Professor Moulton gives a fine arrangement. So does Cary in his 
poetic translation. Genung and several others give fresh poetic translations. 

Professor Whitney writes in the Bibliotheca Sacra for July, 1902, p. 475, 
concerning the improvements made by the English and American Revisers, 
which are especially marked in the Book of Job: "The Book of Job seems to 
have been remarkably improved in this way. Its eloquence, always impressive, 
has seemed to acquire a new splendor with each touch of the corrector's hand. 
It is like the angel that has stood only half -emerged from the marble, but now 
has been chiselled out almost into full and magnificent release." 1 

Utilizing the Class Material. — Only a few persons in the majority 
of churches have sufficient time at their command to make the needed prepa- 
ration for the best teaching on a new theme. Even in our church where there 
are between forty and fifty college graduates, it is difficult to find a teacher for 
the advanced lessons, through a long course. Every one is already over- 
burdened. We find our way out in two directions: (1) We have a different 
teacher for each subject, notified long beforehand; (2) we utilize the material 
in the class for the research work of the different points in the lesson. Both 
of these methods add interest and power. 

Home Work. — It will be impossible to obtain the best results from these 
studies unless the members of the class read the whole Book of Job carefully 
at home. While these lessons continue, it is an excellent plan to give one's 
devotional reading to the Book of Job. In our family, where at the time there 
were no very young children, we found great value in reading Job at family 
prayers during the weeks the lessons were in progress, each individual using a 
different version. Such occasional concentration on one book often produces 
a marvellous effect. 

The Method in this Volume differs from any other course of the sort 
that has come under my notice. In addition to the formal plan, general state- 
ments, Bible references and questions, it offers suggestive thoughts, illustrations, 
practical applications, light from literature, and all that can give not only 
knowledge but inspiration and character-forming power, and help to higher 
daily living, very much as in my " Select Notes on the International Lessons." 

1 See Professor Whitney's illuminating articles on the Latest Translations of the Bible, in 
the Bibliotheca Sacra for April, July and October, 1902; January and April, 1903; April, 1904; 
and January and April, 1905. 



xiv FOREWORD TO TEACHERS 

And as this volume is for the teachers as well as for the members of the 
class, references are given to commentaries, literature, and various sources of 
information which the teacher can explore to his heart's content beyond the 
opportunities of his scholars. All these are not substitutes for work, but the 
means of more work and suggestions for further thought and illustration. They 
are no more "predigested food" or "means of cramming" than every book, 
conversation or sermon one reads or hears. 

It is in just this line of character-forming truths made vivid and clear that 
most teachers stand in the greatest need of help, and where they are most 
likely to fail. Prof. Henry Van Dyke, in his " School of Life," writes from his 
own experience: "If a good book be, as Milton said, 'the precious life-blood 
of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured,' still the sacred relic, as in the vial 
of St. Januarius at Naples, remains solid and immovable. It needs a kind of 
miracle to make it liquify and flow — the miracle of interpretation and inspi- 
ration — wrought most often by the living voice of a wise master, and communi- 
cating to the young heart the wonderful secret that some books are alive. Never 
shall I forget the miracle wrought for me by the reading of Milton's ' Comus ' by 
my father in his book-lined study on Brooklyn Heights, and of Cicero's ' Letters ' 
by Professor Packard in the Latin class at old Princeton." 

My own experience tells the same story of "the miracle of interpretation 
and inspiration." And I trust that this little volume may be the means of that 
same wonder-work in the experience of others. 

Comments. — It would be impossible to include a full commentary in this 
volume; but three things will be included in our plan: 

i. We give references to the best and most helpful commentaries. 

2. We propose to call attention to the most striking and beautiful passages, 
not to 

"Hold a farthing candle to the sun," 

but to summon busy people to view the sun itself. 

We would not "each dark passage shun," provided there is an inner light 
in the dark passage which will shine out like a geode, when the seemingly dull 
and commonplace stone broken open by the hammer of a word of comment 
reveals a cluster of jewels. 

We would call attention to those words and phrases which often have whole 
"poems, epics, idyls" hidden in them as the bud enfolds the rose; those oriental 
allusions, those metaphors which may be illumined as a light within a cathedral 
illumines the windows which, dull and vague to an observer without, become 
to one within pictures exquisitely beautiful in color and form. 

3. We propose to give references to general literature which bears upon 
the subjects discussed, so far as the limits of our space and of our knowledge 
will allow. 

These will be open doors to almost limitless study. 



BIBLIOGRAPHY 

i. For the Members of the Ordinary Class, as distinguished from 
critical scholars, I would place first, as most helpful, and as desirable to be in 
the possession of one or more of the members: 

Professor Genung's " Epic of the Inner Life." Of all the books written upon 
Job, Genung's comes nearest to the real heart of the book. It contains a new 
poetical translation. ($1.25. Houghton & MifHin.) 

Professor Moulton's "Modern Reader's Bible; the Book of Job." The 
Revised Version arranged with his usual skill in dramatic form, with a pecul- 
iarly helpful introduction and brief illuminating notes. It is, however, very 
difficult to keep the connection of places with the ordinary chapters and verses. 
(50c. Macmillan.) 

Dr. Samuel Cox (editor of The Expositor) has written the best and most 
fruitful " Commentary on the Book of Job," with a new translation. " An exposi- 
tion which any man of ordinary culture may read with interest and pleasure." 
(15 shillings. Kegan Paul & Co., London.) 

Dr. Otis Cary's " The Man Who Feared God for Naught." A metrical trans- 
lation, in character arrangement, with "stage directions" which set forth the 
dramatic element; and with an interesting and helpful introduction. (Printed 
at the Orphan Asylum, Okayama, Japan. 50c. Revell.) 

Prof. S. A. Martin's " The Man of Uz." Lessons for young Christians from 
the life of an ancient saint. For Young People's Societies. (50c. Presby- 
terian Board of Publication.) 

William Blake's " Illustrations of the Book of Job." 21 plates. (1826.) Fac- 
simile copies issued by Putnam (1902) at $4.00 (reduced to $2.00, net). An 
old-fashioned but interesting set of pictures. 

2. Commentaries on Job, giving more or less of the critical processes 
and results. 

By Watson, in "Expositor's Bible." 

By Professor Davidson, in the "Cambridge Bible." 

By Daniel Curry. (Methodist Book Concern, 1887.) 

By Dr. Thomas Conant, including the translation by the Baptist Union. 
(1867.) 

By Prof. Franz Delitzsch. (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh.) 

By Dr. Edgar C. S. Gibson, in "Westminster Commentaries." (2d edition, 
1905, Methuen, London.) 



xvi BIBLIOGRAPHY 

"The Book of Job. Handbooks of Bible Series." Rev. James Aitken, 
M.A. (T. & T. Clark.) 

Dillmann, " On the Text of Job." 

Budde's late work on Job has an excellent review by Professor Cheyne 
in The Expositor for June, 1897. 

Professor Driver's "Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament." 

Dr. Washington Gladden's "Seven Puzzling Bible Books." ($1.25. 
Houghton & Mifflin.) 

The "International Critical Commentary on Job," by Prof. S. R. Driver, 
D.D., is in course of preparation. ($3.00. Scribners.) 

3. Monographs on Job: 

Prof. Arthur Peake's "The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament." 

Walls' "The Oldest Drama in the World." (Methodist Book Concern.) 

Rossiter Raymond's "Book of Job," with a metrical paraphrase, the out- 
come of his teaching the book to a Bible Class in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. 
(Appleton.) 

Dean Bradley's "Lectures on Job," delivered in Westminster Abby in 1885, 
1886. (2d edition, Oxford University Press.) 

Professor Royce's "Studies in Good and Evil; the Problem of Job." 
($1.50. Appleton, 1899.) 

Prof. George H. Gilbert's "The Poetry of Job," a rhythmical translation, 
with notes on the poetry of the book. 

The Introduction to the "Book of Job," in the Temple Bible Series, misses 
the very heart of the poem. (50c. Lippincott.) 

Principal Marshall's "The Book of Job," one volume of the "American 
Commentary." A full introduction and notes. (75c. American Baptist 
Publication Society, 1904.) 

Prof. W. H. Green, "Arguments of the Book of Job Unfolded." (New 
York, 1874.) 

Articles in Hastings' "Bible Dictionary," and in the "Encyclopaedia Biblica." 

Froude's Essay on Job, in 'Short Studies on Great Subjects." Vol. i. 

4. Sidelights on Job: 

Professor Butcher's "Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, Greece and 
Israel." ($2.25. Macmillan.) 

J. B. Mozley's "Essays." Vol. ii. 

BushnelPs " Moral Uses of Dark Things." 

James Hinton's "The Mystery of Pain." 

Charles Cuthbert Hall's "Does God Send Trouble?" ($1.00. Houghton 
& Mifflin.) 

5. Comparisons and Contrasts with Other Literature: 
^Eschylus: Drama of "Prometheus Bound," 



BIBLIOGRAPHY xvn 

Sophocles: Drama of "Antigone." 

Goethe: "Faust." Mephistopheles. 

Dante: "Inferno" and " Purgatorio." 

Milton: "Paradise Lost." Satan. 

Shakespeare: "Hamlet;" "the Job of Shakespeare." 

Browning: "The Ring and the Book." 

Mrs. Browning: "Drama of Exile." 

Spenser: "Fairy Queen." 

Plato: "Republic," on Justice. 

Sylvester: "Job Triumphant." 

Quarles: "Job Militant." 

In the Temple Bible, "Job and Ruth," can be found 208 references to 
Job by well-known writers in English literature. 

"There exists in the church of St. Patrice, at Rouen, an interesting but 
little-known series of windows, whose subject is the Book of Job, as told in the 
first two and the last chapters." 

In the Campo Santo at Genoa is a fine statue of Job and his friends. 



INTRODUCTION 



I. THE PROBLEM 

The problem, to throw light on which the Book of Job was written, is: 
The Mystery of Suffering in God's World, in its Twofold Aspect — its 
Relation to God, and its Relation to Man. 

The first mystery lies in the difficulty, especially for one who is suffering, 
of believing that the God who rules this world of tragedies, of wars, of oppres- 
sions, of unspeakable cruelties, and intolerable agonies, is good and wise, a 
loving Father in Heaven. Is it strange that Omar Khayyam could see the 
world as described in his "Rubaiyat," making men 

"But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays 
Upon this chequer-board of Nights and Days. 

Who Man of baser earth did make 

And e'en in Paradise devise the snake." (Sts. lxix, lxxx.) 

Can it be that a good and loving God rules this seemingly misgoverned 
world, where evil comes upon the evil and good alike; where the fire burns 
equally the martyr and the villain; and the storm overwhelms in the same ruin 
the pirate ship and the Morning Star freighted with missionaries and the Gospel; 
where the life of the best men seems to be a tragedy, and its crown a crown of 
thorns, while the wicked sometimes roll in wealth and sit on thrones? 

Is God a mere Relentless Fate, imprisoned in His own laws? Is it a true 
picture which is described in Zola's "La Bete Humaine," of a railway train 
dragged by an engine whose driver has been killed, dashing at headlong speed 
into the midnight? "The train is the world, we are the freight, fate is the 
track, death is the darkness, God is the engineer — who is dead." 

Is the representation of this world by Omar Khayyam according to fact? 

Or can we find an explanation of this world of mingled good and evil in 
the Zoroastrian religion "dating more than twelve centuries before Christ, 
where in order to escape from making God responsible for evil, a dual principle 
was conceived, giving birth to the two brothers, Aurasmazda, the power for 
good, and Ahriman, the power of evil." (Raymond, " The Book of Job," p. 58.) 



THE PROBLEM XIX 

The soul cries out for a good God, not a mere "bright Essence Increate," 
not a mere "Power that makes for Righteousness," but a Loving Father. The 
soul needs faith in God, and love to God. 

"There was the Door to which I found no Key, 
There was the Veil through which I might not see." 
("Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam, st. xxxii.) 

Job's friends tried in a wrong way to find a solution. "For the theologian, 
next to the existence of a good God, the most fundamental question is the 
presence of pain and evil in a world he has ordered." (Prof. R. G. Moulton, 
Ph.D., "Modern Reader's Bible," p. v.) 

The manward aspect of this problem is full of perplexity, conflict, and 
despair. The fact of such seemingly indiscriminate suffering throws a pall 
of darkness over the soul. It is the Sphinx's riddle, 1 which it is death not to 
solve. Who has not asked as the heathen did of the missionary, Why God not 
kill Devil? 

When the quaint Sojourner Truth was seeking to free her children from 
slavery, and in direst extremity knew not where to turn for money or aid, she 
prayed: "O God, if I was as rich as you be, and you as poor as I be, I'd help 
you, you know I would. Now help me." 

If God is so rich, why am I, his child, so poor? 

If God is so strong, why does he permit my enemies — sin, temptation, 
disease, pain, death of my dearest, to overwhelm me, so that I must exclaim: 
All thy waves and thy billows have gone over me? 

If God is so wise and good, why does he let disaster, disappointment, losses, 
heart-break, come upon us till it would seem as if the tempest would never 
be overpast, or the sun shine again? 

This Problem is Universal. — It confronts every individual at some time 
in his life. It belongs to every age. It belongs to the history of Israel as a people, 
to different periods of that history, to the Egyptian bondage, to the Exile, to the 
Maccabean period, and to the history of the Church. It is because of what 
Carlyle terms this "noble universality " that there is so great a variation among 
critics as to the age and date of the writing of the book. 

1 The Sphinx was a monster borrowed from Egyptian symbolism and was represented with 
the body of a winged lion and the breast and head of a human being. According to Hesiod the 
Sphinx took up her abode on a rock near Thebes in Egypt, and gave every passer-by the well- 
known riddle, "What walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three in the 
evening?" She flung from the rock all who could not answer it. When (Edipus explained the 
riddle rightly, as referring to man in the successive stages of infancy, the prime of life, and old 
age, she flung herself down from the rock. See Harper's "Dictionary of Classical Literature 
and Antiquities." Brewer, " Dictionary of Phrase and Fable," gives a poetical version of the riddle: 

"What goes on four feet, on two feet, on three; 
But the more feet it goes on the weaker it be? " 



xx INTRODUCTION 

The Book of Job is the divine light shining on this problem giving all the 
lines of solution possible in the twilight of the early ages, to be seen at last in 
the full blaze following the dayspring Jesus brought from on high. 

The Book of Revelation furnishes a most interesting parallel tc the Book 
of Job, and aids in its understanding. In both cases the beginning is happy 
and peaceful; then follows a long period of conflict; and in both the ending is a 
great and glorious success both in character and in the outward expression. 
(See Samuel Cox, D.D., "Commentary on the Book of Job," pp. n-19; Prof. 
A. B. Davidson, D.D., in the "Cambridge Bible," pp. 23-29; Prof. John F. 
Genung, "The Epic of the Inner Life," pp. 11-15.) 

II. THE LITERARY FORM 

It is almost universally agreed that the basis of the Book of Job was an 
historical fact; that Job was a real man who underwent such severe trials and 
disasters that they made a lasting impression upon his age, and the ages fol- 
lowing. Ezekiel (xiv, 14) and James (v, 11) both mention Job. 1 

The great majority of scholars stand upon Professor Davidson's statement 
that "the Poem reposes upon an historical tradition which the writer adopted 
as suitable for his moral purpose, and the outline of which he has preserved." 
("Cambridge Bible," p. xiii.) 

The opinion of most people half a century ago was that the book was a his- 
tory, an exact reproduction of what was said and done. But aside from various 
other reasons no four or five persons casually brought together ever uttered 
extemporaneously such highly wrought poems, with such beautiful imagery — 
poems which (according to the "Cambridge Bible," p. xviii) "could only be 
the leisurely production of a writer of the highest genius" inspired by God. 

Some years ago a gentleman who lived near the Wayside Inn in Sudbury 
told me, expressing a common belief, that Longfellow's "Tales of a Wayside 
Inn" were actually told by the Student, the Poet, the Theologian, the Musician, 
and the other characters assembled there; and that Mr. Longfellow returning 
to Cambridge wrote them out in jpoetic form. It occurred to me that possibly 
the Book of Job was written, at least in part, in that way. But in answer to 
inquiries as to the fact, Mr. Longfellow wrote me that "the tales were never 
told at Sudbury any more than the 'Canterbury Tales' were told on the way 
from London, or the 'Tales of a Traveller' at a Flemish inn. Howe's Tavern 
at Sudbury was chosen for its many associations, and for the beauty of its neigh- 
borhood. It was only a pleasant and convenient locality for the tales." 

1 Critics differ as to how far the story of Job has been idealized. See Prof. R. G. Moulton, 
"Modern Reader's Bible," p. vii; Rev. Otis Cary, "The Man Who Feared God for Naught," 
p. xi; Samuel Cox, D.D., "Commentary on Job," p. 11; Prof. A. B. Davidson, "Cambridge 
Bible," p. xiii. The arguments for regarding the book as a poem are given by Professor Davidson 
in "Cambridge Bible," p. xvii, etc. See also Daniel Curry, "The Book of Job," p. xxix. 



THE LITERARY FORM xxi 

So the sad experience of Job, his conflict and his final victory were the 
most perfect and fitting groundwork for teaching in the most effective way 
the great divine truths about the darkest problem that faces mankind. 

As the parable of the Prodigal Son has had vastly more power than the same 
truths told in a didactic way, and is a perfect vehicle of divine inspiration; so 
when we realize that the.Book of Job is a divinely inspired poem, drama or epic, 
founded on fact, and true to fact, to life, and to God, the whole book is lifted to a 
higher sphere, and given a more effective power. 

It is well to consider how great are the gains to the right understanding of the 
Bible, from the fact, and the realization of the fact, that the Bible is written in 
such a variety of literary forms, so that every essential truth is presented to us in 
many ways — in prose statement, in story, in poetry, in dramatic presentation, 
in symbol, in metaphor, and especially in history and biography as actually lived 
out by men and nations. And this is necessary in order to guard against mis- 
taken interpretations, errors, and half-truths, which are sure to arise from any 
single presentation. Moreover, we often have to consider the form of the litera- 
ture in which any statement appears before we can, in many cases, determine the 
meaning and application. That Massachusetts governor who quoted Satan's 
words in Job as divine truth would never have done so if he had realized that the 
Book of Job was a dramatic poem. The pessimism in portions of Ecclesiastes, 
which Omar Khayyam has exaggerated, would never have been regarded as 
divinely authorized if its literary structure had been understood. (See Peloubet's 
"The Front Line of the Sunday-School," p. 223.) 

In literary form the Book of Job is a combination of Prose and Poetry, such 
as Shakespeare frequently uses in his plays. The first two chapters, except one 
stanza, and the last chapter, from verse 7 to the end, are in prose. 

The forms of poetic expression are very varied. It is dramatic, and yet is 
not strictly a drama, but " the lack of a theatre to specialize drama has caused 
the dramatic impulse to spread through other literary forms until epic, lyric, 
discourse, are all drawn together on a common basis of dramatic expression." 
"The whole range of literary expression" and "all the modes of thinking of 
which these forms (poetry and prose) are the natural vehicles" are combined in 
the Book of Job. l Hence Professor Moulton calls the book 

A Dramatic Poem Framed in an Epic Story 

Even "the philosophical discussion is also a dramatic debate." (See Prof. R. 
G. Moulton, D.D., " Modern Reader's Bible," pp. vi, vii.) 

Prof. W. T. Davison says (in Hastings' "Bible Dictionary," art. "Job"): 
"The book is not a drama, nor a didactic poem, nor any composition of conven- 
tional form or shape, but ... a law unto itself, which has influenced sub- 

1 For a full discussion of the metrical system of Job, see pp. 132-41 of Moulton, "Modern 
Reader's Bible." 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

sequent writers whose names stand among the highest in literature, yet who, by 
general consent, are merely from the literary point of view outsoared and out- 
shone by their great prototype." (See A. B. Davidson, " Cambridge Bible," 
pp. 21, 22, and his earlier " Commentary on Job.") 

It is to be noted that the structure of the book is itself exquisitely poetic 
and artistic, like the majestic conception of an entire cathedral as distinguished 
from the wealth and beauty of its details. The rapid change of scene from earth 
to heaven; the beautiful idyllic picture of Oriental prosperous life; the inter- 
mingling of divine and satanic and human agencies; the scenes and thoughts 
"fringed around with another world"; the dramatic dialogues; the unexpected 
entrance of the youthful Elihu; the coming of the storm during his speech; and 
the expression of its varying degrees of intensity, till it culminates in the whirlwind 
and the glory of the Shekinah, the voice of God from the whirlwind; the final 
steps toward the restoration of Job, and his ultimate success — all combine in a 
marvellous poetical structure, but perfectly natural, and all necessary to the 
solution of the problem. 

The first prose chapters are as poetic in structure as the poetic portions. 

The poem is full of poetic imagery, with lyrics of exquisite form and surprising 
beauty. "Only a close study of the book can give an idea of the richness and 
multitude of its metaphors, ... its depth of human feeling." (Prof. W. T. 
Davison, in Hastings' " Bible Dictionary," art. " Job.") 

The effect is increased by the variations in the length of the line. 

Hebrew poetry is distinguished in two ways, by its parallelism of thought, 
and by its rhythm, time-beats, or tones. (See Prof. George H. Gilbert, " Poetry 
of Job," p. x; and Prof. G. A. Briggs, D.D., " Biblical Study," Chap. IX.) 

"The Hebrew lines in Job generally have three tones, the only exceptions 
being fifty-nine two-toned, and eighty-five four-toned lines. 

"The number of syllables belonging to the sphere of a single tone varies 
constantly, producing what would be designated, according to our canons of 
meter, a mingling of iambic, trochaic, dactylic and anapestic feet; but the 
rhythm is not often disturbed by this freedom." 1 The English translation is 
not always as melodious as the Hebrew. 

1 This difference in the number of syllables to each beat or tone is frequently seen in modern 
poetry as well as ancient. Take the hymn "Holy, Holy, Holy," and the music for it has to be 
written to accommodate the irregularity of the number of syllables to a beat. So in the first 
line of Cranch's quatrain there are four syllables to the first beat, two each to the second and 
third, and only one to the fourth. 

"Ma'ny are the7thoughts' that/come' t3/me/ 
In' my/lone'ly/mu'sing/, 
And' they/drift' so/strange' and/swift/ 
There's' no/time' for/choo sing."/ 

Yet the beats are equal in time, and the lines are perfectly musical. The best prose always has 
a similar rhythm. 

The most enlightening article I have ever seen on this subject is Poe's " Rationale of Verse." 



THE EPIC OF THE INNER LIFE xxiii 

Parallelism or thought-rhythm is the most distinctive characteristic of 
Hebrew poetry, and is found everywhere. For instance: 

"There the wicked cease from troubling, 
And there the weary be at rest." (Job iii, 17.) 

"Wilt thou harass a driven leaf? 
Wilt thou pursue the dry stubble?" (Job xiii, 25.) 

(See Prof. R. G. Moulton on "The Psalms," and his "Literary Study of the 
Bible.") 

III. THE EPIC OF THE INNER LIFE 

While other writers on Job have suggested that "the action (of the poem) 
is internal and mental, and the successive scenes are representations of the varying 
moods of a great soul struggling with the mysteries of its fate " (" Cambridge 
Bible," p. xxi), it has remained for Prof. John F. Genung to set forth most 
perfectly and completely the real literary nature of the book, in such a way as 
to throw to one side many of the criticisms of its poetic form. 

He calls the book "The Epic of the Inner Life." 

"This poem centres in a hero, whose spiritual achievements it makes known 
to us. . . . It is a record of a sublime epic action, whose scene is not the tumult- 
uous battle-field, nor the arena of rash adventure, but the solitary soul of a 
righteous man. . . . Under these discourses we are to trace not the building of 
a system, but the progress of a character, tried, developed, victorious. . . . Now 
in the Book of Job we have indeed a story, an action, but of very peculiar kind: 
the scene, so far as appears to the eye, only an ash-heap outside an Arab city, 
but to the inner view the soul of man, with all its warring passions, beliefs, 
convictions. It is the spiritual history of the man of Uz, his struggles and 
adventures, unknown to sense, but real to faith, as his fervid thoughts ' go sound- 
ing on, a dim and perilous way.' ... Is it less truly epic than that conflict of 
temptation in the wilderness which Milton has sung — a conflict whose weapons 
were piercing words and whose battle-ground was the soul of the Son of Man?" 
(Pp. 18, 20, 21, 23, 25.) 

It is in reality a kind of dramatically told epic poem describing a real human 
soul in its inner conflicts on the battle-field of the heart, its moral heroic achieve- 
ments, and the final peace of victory. It is the history of a greater warfare than 
Homer's ten years' war around Troy. The greatest battles ever fought were 
on the battle-field within the soul of man. Compare Bunyan's "Capture of 
Mansoul." 

Dean Bradley says: "Like Epic Poems it has a hero, a struggle, and a 
conquest. The hero like a Ulysses or a n ^Eneas, gives his name to the Hebrew 
poem. ... It represents in the sublimest and most striking of forms, a struggle 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

and a triumph in which men of every age and every nation may claim an en- 
during interest." ("Lectures on Job," pp. 13, 14. Compare the construction 
of Tennyson's "In Memoriam.") 

The study of the Book of Job as a mere "argument cunningly put together 
by a skilled reasoner" leaves it "beset with difficulties well-nigh insurmount- 
able." (Genung, "Epic of the Inner Life," p. 4.) The critics see flaws and 
contradictions in the argument; they must add here and take away there, and 
see many a reviser's hand. But these difficulties are avoided when the book is 
studied as the fervent outpourings of a deeply troubled soul; for naturally in that 
case the progress of thought cannot be uniform, the colloquies cannot be reduced 
to syllogisms. They are the outpourings of deep feeling; they have the incon- 
sistencies of a sufferer wrestling with a problem that he cannot solve; they are 
the outpourings of speakers whose feelings are sometimes at white heat. (See 
Hastings' "Bible Dictionary," p. 661.) "There is no life of man faithfully 
recorded but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed." (Carlyle, 
"Memoirs of the Life of Scott.") 

Goethe says, "I never had an affliction which did not turn into a poem." 
Mrs. Browning's sonnet, "Perplexed Music," where a pale musician, on "a 
dulcimer of patience," could make only sad, perplexed, minor music with no 
measured tune, but the angels "smiled down from the stars and whispered, 
Sweet." 

IV. UNITY AND METHOD OF COMPOSITION 

There are two views as to the unity of the book according as the student 
looks upon it — 

from a Literary standpoint and atmosphere; or 
from a Critical standpoint and atmosphere. 

1. From the literary and ethical standpoint the book is one complete and 
beautiful whole, by one inspired author of consummate genius. According 
to the London Spectator (speaking of Homer) : " It is as impossible that a first- 
rate poem or work of art should be produced without a great master-mind to 
conceive the whole, as that a fine living bull should be developed out of beef 
sausages." 

"As a whole, the Book of Job is intelligible, and, indeed, easily intelligible; 
as a piece of patchwork it defies explanation." 

So Genung: "If the discourses of Elihu form no part of the original poem, 
but were added, as the critics assert nowadays, by a subsequent editor, then all 
I have to say is, I prefer to study the poem in its latest edition. From the point 
of view here taken, the writer who added such a finishing touch as this was a 
master in his art, one who could be fully trusted to compose the whole poem, 
as indeed I am willing to believe he did. In other words, I do not think the 
critics who would expel Elihu have made out their case. From their conception 



UNITY AND METHOD OF COMPOSITION xxv 

of the poem's scope and purpose he is in the way; they cannot help desiring his 
absence." ("Epic of the Inner Life," pp. 78, 79.) 

But Elihu is as essential a part of the purpose and mission of the book as a 
hand or arm of a complete man. To leave him out takes away the emphasis 
on his solution of the problem, and that most poetical part of the book describing 
the coming of the storm out of which God speaks. There is no great poem 
extant of which it can be shown that it was composed by several authors at 
different periods. 

Compare the case of Homer. About a century ago the long accepted 
tradition that the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were by a single author named 
Homer, was broken. The " Iliad" was broken by Lackman into sixteen different 
lays, others taught that the "Iliad" had a Homeric kernel enlarged by additions 
by various authors. The two poems were compared by Paley to pictures of 
stained glass, made up by an artistic combination of handsome bits of older 
windows which fortune and time had shivered. But scholars, says President 
Strong, "are of late more and more arraying themselves on the side of the 
traditional view that both poems are substantially by the same author, and 
that this author is Homer. . . . Consider for a moment what demands the 
opposite hypothesis makes upon our credulity. Instead of one Homer, or two 
Homers, we are to believe in many Homers, each equal to the production of a 
poem which may ultimately constitute a part of the 'Iliad' or the 'Odyssey.' 
Are great poets then so plenty in human history?" (See Pres. A. H. Strong, 
D.D., "The Great Poets and their Theology," pp. 6-17; and Gladstone's 
"Homer.") 

2. The larger number of critical scholars look upon Job as a composite 
work, some, like Davidson, confining the later addition to the speech of Elihu; 
others, like Cheyne, making out many additions in all parts of the book, "so 
that the book may have been centuries in coming to its present form," like many 
a large house built by different persons at different periods, in different styles 
of architecture; or possibly like the Cathedral of Cologne which was complete 
after seven centuries from the original plans. 

It is easy to see that they have strong arguments from certain points of 
view — the third round of speeches is incomplete; Elihu comes in without an- 
nouncement, and is not referred to at the conclusion; chapters xxvi-xxviii seem 
to contain contradictions as at present arranged; the closing chapter has peculiar- 
ities of its own. 

The arguments for this view in some of its phases are given in almost every 
book on Job, and can be studied by those who are interested in these questions. 
Davidson thinks that for wholesale reorganization there is no external evidence. 
Moulton obviates some of the difficulties by rearranging chapters xxvi-xxviii. 
Genung obviates others by his view of the book as an epic of the inner life, " for 
we are not concerned to keep the different stages of a spiritual conflict in strict 
logical unity." They never are in such unity. 



xxvi INTRODUCTION 

3. It is well to keep in mind that the various views of the composition and 
growth do not necessarily limit the value of the book, or interfere with the fact 
of its inspiration, though they may modify the theory and method of inspiration. 

4. For Bible class purposes, ethical and spiritual, the book must be treated 
as a whole, as it stands, and all the variant theories of its composition be left in 
the background. 

5. It is not improbable that the author used the story of Job as Shakespeare 
uses old tales as the basis of some of his plays. These facts are common property, 
but no one dreams of discussing the sources of Shakespeare's inspiration to 
the neglect of Shakespeare himself. It has ever been the prerogative of genius 
to take the baser metals and transmute them into gold. 

Browning's "Ring and the Book," according to his own statement to an 
Englishman, was founded on an old manuscript story he found in Rome. 

"When Mrs. Humphry Ward published 'Lady Rose's Daughter' some 
critic discovered that the central character was a portrait of a real French 
historical personage (Mile, de l'Espinasse), introduced by the author for the 
purpose of showing the development of a certain character under certain peculiar 
circumstances." But Mrs. Ward did not tell us so. The same is said to be true 
of her "Marriage of William Ashe." 

It is probable that Homer's "Iliad" was a growth which Homer's genius 
brought into perfect flower. It doubtless grew under his own hand, as Goethe 
in one of his letters to Schiller cites different versions of his own poems. 

Moreover, such a book as Job must have been written in a time of general 
thought and interest and discussion of the problem. The great masterpieces 
of literature are like the highest mountain peaks, which emerge not from a 
sandy plain, but from a mountainous country. 

In the words of Genung: 

"Genius may indeed be a mighty tree, growing from an unseen germ to 
be the one commanding object of the plain; but it is rooted in the same soil that 
nourishes the shrubs at its feet. A great work of literature both feeds its age 
and is fed by it. What the book returns, in transmuted and vitalized form, 
to its generation is what it has already gathered out of the hopes and needs and 
problems that surround it. Not that the highest literature is merely the echo 
of the people's surging thought, and no more; we cannot say this of Tennyson 
and Browning and Whittier and Emerson to-day: it is rather the utterance of 
those who, making the universal cause their own, stand nearest the light, and 
bring the people's inarticulate longings to expression. ... In them we hear, 
not one man alone, but the vast body of the time, pervaded by a spirit of hope or 
doubt or inquiry; a spirit voiceless, until the JEolian strings of the poet's heart 
feel and answer to its breathings." ("Epic of the Inner Life," pp. 89, 90.) 



THE AGE AND DATE OF THE BOOK xxvii 



V. AUTHOR 

The authorship of the Book of Job is entirely unknown. No hint any- 
where is given as to who wrote the book. He is the " Great Unnamed," inspired 
by the Holy Spirit of God. 

"It is a point on which even this omniscient age must be content to remain 
in doubt." 

VI. THE AGE AND DATE OF THE BOOK 

i. The period when Job lived, to which his personal story belongs, the 
scene of the drama, is almost universally understood to be the age of the Patriarchs 
some two thousand years before Christ. But this gives no information as to 
the time when the book was written, any more than the date of "King Lear" 
or of " Julius Caesar" tells us when Shakespeare wrote his plays. 

2. As to the period when the Book of Job was written scholars widely differ. 

Nearly all, at present, think that the Jewish belief that the book was written 
by Moses during his forty years in the desert is unfounded, although Moses 
needed its consolations as much as any one has needed them since. 

The majority of authorities place the writing of the book somewhere between 
the age of Solomon and the Exile, some at one period and some at another as 
to them appear the circumstances which call for such light on their troubles. 
Genung ("Epic of the Inner Life," pp. 90, 118), Can- ("The Man "Who Feared 
God for Naught," pp. xii-xx) and Ewald place it in the age of Uzziah and 
Hezekiah. Cox (" Commentary on the Book of Job," pp. 6-9), Cum' ("The 
Book of Job," pp. xiv-xxi), Bradley ("Lectures on Job," pp. 169-77) and 
Davidson ("Cambridge Bible," pp. lv-lxviii — as the earliest possible date) 
place it about the age of Solomon. Cheyne ("Job and Solomon" — for the last 
revision), Wellhausen and Davidson (by preference) about the time of the 
captivity. 

For a discussion of the reasons for their choice, study the above authors. 

"The strongest argument (for a late date), and perhaps the only one which 
is really conclusive, is drawn from the subject matter." The theme here dis- 
cussed and the manner of its discussion "necessitate a long previous history." 
The problems are old, but they could not be raised in the manner disp'aytd by 
Job without a previous religious history of considerable duration. And "the 
history of the Old Testament shows that only at a comparatively late period 
were these maxims (of the current explanations of the facts of life given by 
Job's three friends) questioned." (W. T. Davison in Hastings' "Bible Dic- 
tionary," art. "Job.") 

On the other hand, sufficient account is not taken by most scholars of the 
fact that the whole atmosphere of the poem as it now stands is patriarchal and 
ancient. It is far more like the atmosphere of Genesis and Judges than like 



xxviii INTRODUCTION 

Kings and the Prophets. As Froude remarks: "The material is so rich and 
pregnant that we might with little difficulty construct out of it a complete picture 
of the world as then it was: its life, knowledge, arts, habits, superstitions, hopes 
and fears." (Froude, "Short Studies on Great Subjects," p. 211.) And there 
is not a single reference or allusion to anything that might not have existed in 
those early days. The reference to the laws in Deuteronomy, even if it were true 
that Deuteronomy is a late book, are similar to those in the "Code of Ham- 
murabi," dated by scholars even earlier than Abraham. The references to 
captivities and troubles were as true of an earlier as of a later period. As 
Renan remarks, it is "impossible to believe that any poet of Solomon's age 
should have thrown himself back into an age so distant and have maintained 
the tone throughout. Such a feat has never been achieved; such a feat was 
wholly foreign to the spirit of the time." (Samuel Cox, D.D., " Commentary on 
Job," p. 9.) 

It is still more marvellous, bordering on the inconceivable, that an author 
living in the time of the prophets, of the temple, and of the Psalms, and in all 
the light which Israel's history could shed upon the problem, should utterly 
ignore all this divine light and confine himself to that which was known in the 
earlier ages, before a single book of Scripture was written. 

Therefore the argument for an earlier time, probably at some period in the 
age of the Judges, is stronger than all the arguments for a later age. 

Though Job is to be classed with the Wisdom Literature of the Bible, there 
is no regular, orderly progression of great books such as one might naturally 
expect. There is no regular progression of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, 
Tennyson. And the theme of the Book of Job must have puzzled men even 
long before Abraham. It belongs to man as man. 

Note that while the age or period of the writing of Job is an interesting and 
enlightening question, yet practically it has no especial bearing upon the sub- 
ject of the book, and is of no further account in our studies. 



VII. RELATION TO OTHER SCRIPTURES 

An interesting study can be made by comparison of passages in Job with 
similar ones in other portions of Scripture, in addition to those especially relating 
to the themes we consider in the progress of our studies. 

For instance, Job himself is referred to in Ezekiel xiv. 14; James v. 11. 
Job xxxi. 33 refers to Adam; xxii. 16 perhaps to the Flood; Job i. 21; ii. 10 
remind us of the prayer of Habakkuk. Ps. xxxvii and xxxviii suggest a general 
comparison with Job. 



STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK xxix 

Compare 

Job iii. 3-10 with Jer. xx. 14-18. Job xiii. 28 with Isa. 1. 9. 

Job vi. 15 with Jer. xv. 18. Job xiv. 11 with Isa. xix. 5. 

Job vii. 17, 18 with Ps. viii. 4 Job xv. 35 with Isa. lix. 4. 

Job ix. 18 with Lam. iii. 15. Job xvi. 13 with Lam. iii. 12. 

Job xii. 4 with Jer. xx. 7. Job xxviii. 28 with Eccl. xii. 13. 

Job xii. 9 with Isa. xii. 20. Job xxx. 9 with Lam. iii. 14. 

NEW TESTAMENT ON OLD TESTAMENT PROBLEMS. 

Job i. 9-1 1, 22 compare 2 Cor. vi. 4-6. 

Job iii. 17 compare Matt. xi. 28-30; Rev. xxi. 27. 

Job v. 17 compare Heb. xii. 6-1 1. 

Job vii. 21 compare Rom. viii. 1. 

Job ix. 33 compare Heb. i. 1-3. 

Job xiv. 14 ) „ 

1 , > compare 1 Cor. xv. 42-57. 

Job xix. 25-27 ) r 

Job xxi. 15 compare Matt. vi. 33; 1 Tim. vi. 6; Heb. xi. 6. 

Job xxiii. 3 compare John xiv. 9 10. 

Job xxiii. 10 compare 1 Pet. i. 7. 

Job xxv. 4 compare Rom. v. 1. 

Job xxxiii. 29-30 compare James i. 2, 3, 12; Rom. v. 3, 4. 

Job xxxv. 10 compare Acts xvi. 25, 26. 

CHOICE PORTIONS 

(to be learned by heart). 

Job iii. 17. Job xviii. 5. Job xxviii. 12-15, 2 3> 28, 

Job iv. 13-19. Job xix. 25-27. Job xxix. 15. 

Job v. 17, 18. Job xxiii. 10. Job xxxiii. 14-30. 

Job xi. 7-9. Job xxv. 4-6. Job xxxviii. 11. 

Job xiv. 14. Job xxvi. 14. Job xlii. 5, 6. 



VIII. STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK 

We will understand the meaning of the book best by noticing its peculiar 
structure. 

It consists of five divisions: 

1. Chapters i and ii, the prologue, in prose, the story on which the rest of 
the book is founded. It consists of five scenes, some on earth and some in 
heaven. The speakers are Jehovah, Job, Satan, four Messengers Job's wife. 



\ 



xxx INTRODUCTION 



2. Chapters iii-xxxi, in poetic form, the colloquy between Job and his three 
friends, continued through three rounds. Besides these there was an audience 
of neighbors, citizens, children, visitors, rabble. 

3. Chapters xxxii-xxxvii. The Oration of Elihu. Poetry. Job, his 
three friends and citizens for audience. The oration was cut short by the 
storm. 

4. Chapters xxxviii-xli. God speaks from the whirlwind. Poetry. Job, 
his three friends, Elihu, and citizens for audience. . 

5. Chapter xlii. 1-6. Poetry. Brief colloquy between the Lord and Job. 
Verses 7-17, prose. The complete restoration of Job. His spiritual and 
material history. 

Now corresponding to these five divisions are the five solutions of the problem. 
So long as we have looked for only one solution, in the usual way, the mystery 
was unexplained, for there is no one solution that can explain all. It takes all 
five. 

The solution of Part I is that sometimes trouble is A Test. 

The solution of Part II is that sometimes it is A Punishment. 

The solution of Part III is that it is A Discipline. 

The solution of Part IV is that it is sometimes An Insoluble Mystery. 

The solution of Part V is that the good man always comes to True Success 
at last. His life is never a tragedy. 

Note that these solutions are the only conceivable solutions. Jesus Christ 
brought life and immortality to light, but so far as this problem is concerned 
his message flows in these five channels. What in Job was seen in the twilight 
Jesus shows us flooded with the light of the morning sun. The mountains and 
valleys, the forests and the rivers are the same in both, but what was a shadowy 
outline in Job is revealed in blessed clearness, in heavenly color, and absolute 
certainty in Christ. 

"The Book of Job is about as long as Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'; like that 
Drama, it has five acts Which are arranged in twenty-one scenes." (Walls, 
"The Oldest Drama in the World," p. 17.) 



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PERSONS AND SCENES 

Persons 
Jehovah 
Sons of God 
The Adversary 
Job, a wealthy sheik 
Job's wife 
A field hand 
A shepherd 
A drover 
A house servant 

Eliphaz, a venerable sheik from Teman 
Bildad, a scholar from Shuah 
Zophar, a prince of Naamah 
Elihu, a young chief from Buz 
Job's brothers 
Job's sisters 
Neighbors 
Citizens 
Boys 
Rabble 



Scenes 
Job's home at Uz, a walled town surrounded by 

broad fields 
The council in heaven 
A huge ash heap outside the walls 
A great storm 
A sacrifice and prayer 
Job's home at Uz 



PART I 

THE HISTORICAL BASIS OF THE POEM. 
PROSE. (Chapters i and ii.) 

A SERIES OF FIVE SCENES 

Changing from earth to heaven and back again. One of the most 
dramatic portions of the book. 

TIME : Several weeks or months. 

SCENES: Job's home at Uz. The council in heaven. 

CHARACTERS: Jehovah. Sons' of God. The Adversary. Job. 
Messengers. Job's Wife. 

FIRST SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM: SOMETIMES 
AFFLICTIONS ARE SENT AS A TEST OF CHARACTER 

RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

(To be assigned the previous lesson to various members of the class. Topics 
for discussion in the class.) 

1. The geography of the lesson. 

2. The character of Job, as stated at the beginning and end of the book, 
and as learned from what he says, especially in chapter xxxi. 

3. Why is Job represented as so perfect? its bearing on the solution of the 
problem. 

4. Why were the scenes in heaven concealed from Job? 

5. The character of Satan, as revealed here and in other parts of the Bible. 

6. The character of Job's wife. 

7. The two sources of Job's afflictions — from man and from nature. Do 
these sources make any difference in our feelings and perplexity concerning our 
troubles? 

8. Why is trouble from sickness and pain a severer test of character than 
loss of property? 

9. The aggravation of affliction from the misjudgments of relatives and 
friends. 



2 PART I: THE TEST 

10. How does suffering reveal us to ourselves? 

ii. How does the way we bear trouble test our character before the world? 

12. Does God send trouble? Report on C. Cuthbert Hall's book of that 
name. 

13. What is God's relation to trouble that comes to us through bad men? 
Bible references. 

14. What is God's relation to trouble that comes to us through his laws of 
nature? Bible references. 

15. What part has Satan in our afflictions? 

16. Bible instances of trouble coming upon good men. 

17. Hymns expressing the truths of this portion of the Book of Job. 



Scene I. — Earth : 


Job at home, prosperous, peaceful. 


Scene II. — Heaven : 


Council of Sons of God. Jehovah. Satan. 
Satan goes on his mission. 


Scene III. — Earth: 

Job's Home 
at Uz. 


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Drover from Chaldeans. 


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Scene IV. — Heaven : 


Council of Sons of God. ) Jehovah. Satan. 
Second meeting. ) Report of Satan. 


Scene V. — Earth : 


An ash heap. Job a leper. Friends, relatives, 
citizens. 



SCENE I: JOB AT HOME 



THE LAND OF JOB 

As for the scene of the story, history, tradition, and the indications of the 
poem all point to the Hauran as the country in which Uz was situated. This 
is accepted by all scholars. 

The Sea of Galilee and the upper Jordan are west of the Hauran; the 
Syrian desert extending toward the Euphrates is its eastern boundary; the 
Syrian mountains are on the north; and on the south are Moab, Arabia, and 
Edom. It is within easy reach of Damascus on the north. 

The Arabs who to-day live in the district claim it as "the land of Job." 

It is the country where most of the Abrahamides (descendants of Abraham 
other than through Isaac) found their homes. 

It is to-day rich in the kind of wealth of which Job was possessed. It is 
exposed to the same kind of raids, and presents the same natural features of 
gorges and ravines whose treacherous streams the poet describes. From the 
desert come the same kinds of deluges of sudden rain and whirlwinds. 1 

The Chaldeans belonged to the region of the Euphrates. They were 
originally a robber tribe, and roamed for plunder as far west as Palestine. 
The Sabeans were a tribe of the desert Arabs, and accustomed to raid the 
cultivated lands. 

SCENE I. JOB AT HOME 

Job lived in the walled 2 town of Uz, with broad pastures and cultivated lands 
extending in every direction. He was very wealthy, with great herds and 
flocks, and a vast retinue of officers and servants. He was a prince, " the greatest 
of all the children of the East." His sons and daughters were settled not far 
away, and partook of his prosperity. He was a man in the very prime of life. 
His 3,000 camels imply that he was a "princely merchant, sending out large 
caravans to trade in the cities of the East." Thus is presented before us a 
beautiful picture of "the simple life," of well-earned prosperity, of serene 
peace, of deep piety, and wide usefulness. An ideal life of those days. 

What is the truth in the following statement as regards this earlier portion 
of Job's life? "All this is life's crown," we say. "No," says the great artist, 
"it is not yet life's beginning." 

The Character of Job. — We learn this from two sources: 

1. The testimony of Jehovah. Job was "a perfect and an upright man, 
one that feareth God and escheweth (Am. Rev. 'turneth away from') evil." 
(Job i. 8; ii. 3.) Evil was repulsive to him. "There is none like him in the 
earth." "He holdeth fast his integrity" in spite of his sufferings. "In all 

1 For further information see Cox, "Commentary on the Book of Job," p. 10; Curry, "The 
Book of Job," p. xxvi and Appendix; Raymond, "The Book of Job," pp. 25-36. 

2 It was the Oriental custom, as in many primitive peoples, for farmers to live in walled 
cities for safety, and to go out thence to their daily labors in vineyards and pastures. 



4 PART I: THE TEST 

this did not Job sin with his lips." (Job ii. 10.) Compare James (iii. 2): 
"If any stumbleth not in word, the same is a perfect man." (Why?) 

Note that Job did not gain this goodness and character without victory 
over temptation. It was not mere innocence, it was character wrought out in 
the presence of trial. Wealth and power often furnish the severest temptations 
to pride, worldliness, selfishness, abuse of power, fleshly lusts. 

"Satan now is wiser than of yore 
And tempts by making rich, not making poor." 

(Pope, "Moral Essays," iii. 351.) 

2. We learn the character of Job from the testimony he gives under oath 
in chapter xxxi, which Moulton calls his " Oath of Clearing." He was pure in 
heart; he was honest to the core; he refused to oppress the poor; he was generous; 
he aided the fatherless and made the widow's heart sing for joy; he did not 
trust in his riches; he was an upright judge; he loved his enemies; he was hospi- 
table to strangers; he made no dishonest gains; he was faithful and true to his 
God. 

Job was a gentleman of the old school. He was the Sir Galahad among 
the Knights of the Round Table. He was not a recluse or an ascetic, for he 
did not disapprove of his children's feasts, but simply guarded against their 
dangers. 

"His life was gentle; and the elements 
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up 
And say to all the world, This was a Man." 

(Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar," v. 5.) 

"A combination and a form indeed 
Where every god did seem to set his seal 
To give the world assurance of a man." 

(Shakespeare, "Hamlet," iii. 4.) 

"A creature such 
As to seek through the regions of the earth 
For one his like, there would be something failing 
In him that should compare. I do not think 
That such an outward and such stuff within 
Endows a man but he." 

(Quoted in Cox, "Commentary on Job," p. 14.) 

"The blessings of her quiet life 
Fell on us like the dew; 
And good thoughts where her footsteps pressed 
Like fairy blossoms grew." 

(Whittier, " Gone.") 



SCENE II: THE UNSEEN WORLD 5 

For a discussion of Job's patience, see under Part II. 

The value of such an ideal character held up before the people for ages 
was very great. It was a perpetual educational force. It was a living example 
of the Ten Commandments, reinforcing every one. Dr. Parkhurst remarks, 
"While books can teach, personality only can educate." "The most influential 
thing in the world," says Professor Whitney, "is, we suppose, what men see 
in other people's lives." "No nobler feeling," says Carlyle, "than admiration 
for one higher than himself dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour, and 
at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life." (" Heroes and Hero Worship," 
The Hero as Divinity, p. 10.) 

"There could not be a national history (according to Edersheim, "Life of 
Christ," vol. ii, Chap. IX), nor even romance, to compare with that by which a 
Jewish mother might hold her child entranced." 

"As the Grecian mother to the child upon her knee 
Sang of the land's heroic songs, 
Sang of Thermopylae, of Marathon, 
Of proud Plataea's day 

Until the neighboring hills, from peak to peak, 
Answered the resounding lay." 

SCENE II. IN THE UNSEEN WORLD. THE SONS OF GOD AS- 
SEMBLED IN COUNCIL. (Job i. 6-12.) 

Enter Satan, the Adversary. 1 

{This scene is a poetic expression of the real facts which belong to every age. 
Satan sums up the feeling of bad men the world over.) 

READINGS IN CHARACTER. 

Jehovah {to Satan). 

"Whence comest thou?" 
The Adversary. 

"From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up 
and down in it." 
Jehovah. 

"Hast thou considered my servant Job? for there is none 
like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one 
that feareth God, and escheweth evil." 

1 The best man, the most unlike Satan, should be chosen to read the part of Satan, just as 
in the Oberammergau Passion Play the part of Judas was taken by a man who, when some visitor 
asked him to do a dishonorable act, replied, "I am Judas only in the play." 



6 PART I: THE TEST 

The Adversary. 

"Doth Job fear God for naught? Hast thou not made an 
hedge about him and about his house, and about all that 
he hath, on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his 
hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But 
put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and 
he will renounce thee to thy face." 
Jehovah. 

"Behold all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself 

put not forth thine hand." 
So Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord. 

Take note that Job is entirely unconscious of this scene, and of the reasons 
why affliction is sent upon him. And this was necessary in order to make the 
test. If there had been no mystery, no unexplained evil, the whole character 
of the test would have been different. It is one thing to suffer evil as a martyr 
or a hero; it is a very different thing to trust and love God amid the inexplicable 
mysteries of sorrow and loss. 

The reasons for Job's sufferings are revealed to the reader in order that he 
may comprehend the whole action of the poem, that he alone may see the 
working out of the problem, from the divine point of view. He sees from the 
first what Job and his friends could not so easily understand, that there are 
other reasons for sorrow than the punishment for sin, and other sources of 
calamity than the wickedness of the sufferer. 

Sons of God. — Those spirits who inherit his nature, work his will, are in 
entire sympathy with his character and plans. 

"Who at his bidding speed 
And post o'er land and ocean without rest." 

(Milton, "Sonnet on his Blindness.") 

Take note how God delights in the good man, rejoices as his "angels rejoice 
over one sinner that repenteth." (See Luke xv. 7, 10.) 

Satan, the Adversary. — The adversary of good both in God and man. 

From the story as given here we learn (1) that he went to and fro in the earth, 
not to find good, but evil, and that is one Cain-mark of a bad being. A dis- 
tinguished American preacher once said, " I thank God that I love the good ten 
thousand times more than I hate the evil." That is an angel-mark of goodness. 

(2) The adversary did not believe in the existence of good, for he found 
none in his own heart and experience. Another sign of an evil character. 

(3) The adversary loved to do evil, to tempt, to injure men, to bring ruin, to 
destroy men's faith in goodness. 



SCENE III: JOB'S HOUSE 7 

Now these are the characteristics of Satan found all through the Scriptures, 
revealed more and more fully, expressed in different ways under different 
circumstances, but the same "old serpent, the Devil," who tempted Adam and 
who tempted Christ. 

A brief study of the Scriptural representations will reveal to us the nature 
of our adversary. 

Old Testament: Gen. iii. i; i Chron. xxi. i; Zech. iii. i. 

New Testament: Matt. iv. i-ii; xiii. 19, 39; Luke iv. 6; xiii. 16; xxii. 31; 
John viii. 38-44; xii. 31; xiii. 2; Eph. vi. 11, 12; 2 Tim. ii. 26, etc. 

Moulton ("Modern Reader's Bible," p. 147) makes Satan a general In- 
spector, or Guardian of the earth, suspicious, but without malignity, "an 
adversary only in the sense in which any inspector or examiner is opposed to 
those on whom he exercises his office." 

Is this the representation in Job? (See Samuel Cox, "Commentary on 
Job," pp. 14, 15; Prof. John F. Genung, "Epic of the Inner Life," pp. 32, 134; 
"Cambr dge Bible," p. 7.) 

"But of this be sure — 
To do aught good will never be our task, 
But ever to do ill our sole delight. 

And out of good still to find means of evil." 

(Milton, "Paradise Lost," 1. 158-65.) 

Satan came among the sons of God, not as Apollyon, but as an angel of 
light. 1 "The prince of darkness is a gentleman." ("King Lear.") Other- 
wise he would be a fool as well as a villain, and be far less dangerous. 

"His form had not yet lost 
All his original brightness, nor appeared 
Less than archangel ruined." 

(Milton, "Paradise Lost," 1. 591-93.) 

SCENE III. A SUDDEN CHANGE TO JOB'S HOUSE. (Job i. 13-22.) 

Job sitting quietly in the magnificence of a great Oriental chief. Dr. Walls 
("The Oldest Drama in the World," p. 22) may be right in his picture: "The 
messengers in this scene enter in great excitement, and drenched with rain through 
which they came. The fire from heaven which consumed the sheep and the wind 
from the wilderness which smote the four corners of the house, were perhaps the 
lightning and the cyclone of one storm." 

1 Compare Milton's description of Satan. Goethe, in " Faust," draws his portrait of Mephis- 
topheles and founds his prologue "wholly on the ideas of this incident in Job." Compare the 
Satan in Bickersteth's "Yesterday, To-day and Forever"; Mrs. Browning's Satan in her "Drama 
of Exile"; Byron's Satan in his "Vision of Judgment"; Dante's Satan, "a horrible, symbolic 
monster." See Raymond, "Book of Job," pp. 60-62. 



8 PART I: THE TEST 

READINGS IN CHARACTER. 

Enter First Messenger, in great haste. 

First Messenger, a herder from distant pastures {speaking excitedly to Job). 

"The oxen were ploughing, and the asses feeding beside them; 
and the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; 
yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the 
sword; and I only am escaped [£ ^ Secqnd Messenge ^ 
alone to tell thee." 

Second Messenger, a shepherd from the fields. 

"The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up 

the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I 

only am escaped alone to tell ,„ . ^ ,, , 

J r [Enter Third Messenger.] 

thee." 
Third Messenger, from the edge of the desert. 

"The Chaldeans made three bands, and fell upon the camels, 
and have taken them away, yea, and slain the servants 
with the edge of the sword; 

and I only am escaped alone [Enter Fourth Messenger.] 
to tell thee." 

Fourth Messenger, a house servant from town. 

"Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking 
wine in their eldest brother's house: and behold there 
came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the 
four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young 
men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to 
tell thee." 



The Effect on Job. — Job stood the test. He rent his mantle and shaved 
his head, "conventional and altogether appropriate forms of expressing his deep 
sense of his losses," while his falling down, the Oriental attitude of worship, 
and his worship of God, showed his unshaken faith and allegiance to God. He 
went to his one source of comfort. Clouds and darkness surrounded the 
Providence of God; but he knew that there was a silver lining on the other side, 
and that in spite of all God is good. 






SCENE IV: THE UNSEEN WORLD 9 

Job {crushed at first, and lying prone in the dust). 

" Naked came I out of my mother's womb, 
And naked shall I return thither.'' l 
{Then after a pause he regains his faith, and rises up.) 

" The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away ; 
Blessed be the name of the Lord." 

In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God with foolishness. 

Then 

" The morning stars sang together, 
And all the sons oj God shouted for joy." 

(Job xxxviii. 7.) 

SCENE IV. THE UNSEEN WORLD. (Job ii. 1-6.) 
The Sons of God again assembled in council. 
The Adversary returning from his experimental test of Job. 

READINGS IN CHARACTER. 

Jehovah (to The Adversary). 

"From whence comest thou?" 
The Adversary. 

"From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up 
and down in it." 
Jehovah. 

"Hast thou considered my servant Job? for there is none 
like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one 
that feareth God, and escheweth evil : and he still holdeth 
fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, 
to destroy him without cause." 
The Adversary. 

"Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his 
life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone 
and his flesh, and he will renounce thee to thy flesh." 
Jehovah. 

"Behold, he is in thine hand; only spare his life." 

1 So Paul (1 Tim. vi. 7): We brought nothing into the world, for neither can we carry any- 
thing out. 



io PART I: THE TEST 

"The general sense of 'skin for skin' is clear enough, but the exact force 
of the proverb is not easy to catch." The meaning becomes clearer by com- 
parison with some ancient proverbs quoted by Cox. The Arabic proverb "a 
hide for a hide," i. e., nothing without a full equivalent. The Jewish proverb, 
"One gives one's skin to save one's skin," i. e., gives a part to save the rest, "but 
gives all to save his life." Satan recognizes no good motive, but thinks Job 
would make a bargain with God and by giving up his property save his life, 
which includes health and whatever makes life worth living. 

SCENE V. (i) THE CITY OF UZ. JOB'S HOUSE. (Job ii. 7-10.) 

Satan comes from the council 0} the Sons of God and brings upon Job, 
in some natural way, the most distressing disease possible, including not only 
pain, but depression of soul, separation from all that he loves, disfigurement and 
disgrace in the eyes of all around him. 

Job's Disease. — It is generally agreed that the disease of Job was the 
leprosy called Elephantiasis, so named because the swollen limbs and the black 
and corrugated skin of those afflicted by it resemble those of the elephant. It 
is said by ancient authors, as Pliny, to be peculiar to Egypt, but it is found in 
other hot countries such as the Hijaz, and even in northern climates as Norway. 
It is said to attack the limbs first, breaking out below the knees and gradually 
spreading over the whole body. We are probably to consider, however, that 
Job was smitten "from the sole of his foot unto fys crown" all at once. Full 
details of its appearance and the sensations of those affected may be gathered 
from the Book, though, being poetically coloured, they will hardly bear to be 
read like a page from a handbook of Pathology. The ulcers were accompanied 
by an itching so intolerable that a piece of potsherd was taken to scrape the 
sores and remove the feculent discharge, ii. 8. The form and countenance 
were so disfigured by the disease that the sufferer's friends could not recognise 
him, ii. 12. The ulcers seized the whole body both without and inwardly, 
xix. 20, making the breath fetid, and emitting a loathsome smell that drove 
every one from the sufferer's presence, xix. 17, and made him seek refuge out- 
side the village upon the heap of ashes, ii. 8. The sores, which bred worms, 
vii. 5, alternately closed, having the appearance of clods of earth, and opened and 
ran, so that the body was alternately swollen and emaciated, xvi. 8. The 
patient was haunted with horrible dreams, vii. 14, and unearthly terrors, iii. 25, 
and harassed by a sensation of choking, vii. 15, which made his nights restless 
and frightful, vii. 4, as his incessant pains made his days weary, vii. 1-4. His 
bones were filled with gnawing pains, as if a fire burned in them, xxx. 30, or 
as if his limbs were tortured in the stocks, xiii. 27, or wrenched off, xxx. 17. 
He was helpless, and his futile attempts to rise from the ground provoked the 
merriment of the children who played about the heap where he lay, xix. 18. 
The disease was held incurable, though the patient might linger many years, 
and his hopelessness of recovery made him long for death, iii. 20 and often. 
(Prof. A. B. Davidson, in "Cambridge Bible," in loco.) 



SCENE V-. THE CITY OF UZ II 

(2) OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS 

Job departs from his house and goes outside the city walls, because persons 
•with this loathsome and infectious disease were not allowed within. We next 
see Job lying on the city ash-mound, called a Mezbele. " The dung which is 
heaped upon the Mezbele of the Hauran villages is not mixed with straw, which 
in that warm and dry land is not needed for litter, and r it comes mostly from solid- 
hoofed animals, as the flocks and oxen are left over-night in the grazing places. 
It is carried in baskets in a dry state to this place before the village, and usually 
burnt once a month. . . . The ashes remain. . . . If the village has been in- 
habited for centuries the Mezbele reaches a height far overtopping it. The winter 
rains reduce it into a compact mass, and it becomes by and by a solid hill of earth. 
. . . The Mezbele serves the inhabitants for a watchtower, and in the suitry 
evenings for a place of concourse, because there is a current of air on the height. 
There all day long the children play about it; and there the outcast, who has been 
stricken with some loathsome malady, and is not allowed to enter the dwellings of 
men, lays himself down, begging an alms of the passers-by by day, and by night 
sheltering himself among the ashes which the heat of the sun has warmed. There, 
too, lie the village dogs, perhaps gnawing a fallen carcass, which is often flung 
there." (From Wetzstein, quoted by Davidson and Moulton, " Modern Reader's 
Bible," p. 149.) 

READINGS IN CHARACTER. 

Job's Wife (to Job). 

"Dost thou still hold fast thine integrity? renounce God 
- and die.'* 
Job. 

"Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. 
What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and 
shall we not ^receive evil?" 

In all this did not Job sin with his lips. 

Parallel. — Habakkuk, a contemporary of Jeremiah, and prophesying 
in the last years of the kingdom of Judah, when the Chaldeans under Nebuchad- 
nezzar were about to come and overwhelm the land, and sweep away the city, 
the temple, and the nation itself, sang in a hymn of prayer (iii. 17, 18): 

"Though the fig-tree shall not blossom, 
Neither shall fruit be in the vines; 
The labor of the olive shall fail, 
And the fields shall yield no meat; 



12 PART I: THE TEST 

The flock shall be cut off from the fold, 
And there shall be no herd in the stalls; 
Yet will I rejoice in the Lord, 
I will joy in the God of my salvation." 

Job stood the test in this hardest kind of trial. 

The disease was such as to weaken his physical power of sustaining 
his sufferings. Many a holy saint succumbs to despondency and doubt 
under diseases that affect the nerves and digestion. It is hard to make 
the music of hope and faith on the "harp of a thousand strings" when 
they are broken, and wet with tears, and out of tune. We often do not 
give credit enough to some persons who are struggling and fighting against 
disease, because they are not as joyful and triumphant as others in good 
health. 

Job's wife is probably introduced to give the last terrible touch to the 
monumental suffering of Job, for now he must " tread the wine-press alone." 
One by one the others had failed him; his children were dead, his friends kept 
away, and now, at last, his wife, who had endured the other trials, yields when 
she sees her husband incurably diseased, and takes part against his conscience 
and his duty to God. 

Father Taylor, the famous sailors' preacher of Boston, was greatly depressed 
in his last illness ; and when some one tried to comfort him by the assurance 
that he would soon be with the angels, he replied, "I don't want angels, I want 
folks." 

Dr. Samuel Cox is right in saying that Job's wife has been a much maligned 
woman, both by scholars and in the popular imagination, as if she were a kind 
of scriptural Xantippe. Chrysostom thought she was left alive to be a scourge 
of Job, the last bitter drop in his cup of suffering. It is unjust, and far from 
the way we would like to be judged, to infer her whole character from one 
sentence uttered under intense excitement. Job himself did not call her foolish, 
but delicately said she had uttered a foolish thing. She suffered the loss of all 
things, as Job did, and no murmur proceeds from her lips. The wife of such a 
man and the mother of such children may well be "a woman nobly planned." 
It must have been harder for her to see him stunned and hopeless on the ash 
heap than to sit there herself. 

According to the story God did not judge her as harshly as men have done, 
for she too was raised to share his sevenfold splendors and prosperity, and to 
bear him sons and daughters. 

One more trial came later, a trial which intensified the bitter anguish of 
all his other calamities, in the interpretation his friends, and therefore the world, 
put upon his losses and sufferings. "No mortal," says Homer, "ever suffered 
such pain and such affliction" as his Ulysses. "The fearful dangers through 
which Ulysses goes exalt his fame and glorify him." 



LESSONS IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE 13 

"Ah, brother! have you not full oft 

Found even as the Romans did, 

That in life's most delicious draught 
'Surgit amari aliquid."' 

(Something bitter comes unbid.) 

Observe that Job was enabled to stand these tests of his character because of 
his faithfulness in all his previous life. His faithfulness in the lesser things 
enabled him to be faithful in the greater things. His victories over small tempta- 
tions enabled him to gain the victory in harder battles, as David by his over- 
coming the lion and the bear was assured that God would give him the victory 
over Goliath. 

Search the Scriptures for teachings and examples in regard to this principle. 

Observe that the character of Job, as a paragon of goodness unequalled on 
earth and the sufferings of Job as the utmost that can come to man, are presented 
in these extremes so that the instruction and comfort of the book may reach all 
men. God allows the worst of suffering to come upon the best of men, and Job 
is true to God under the most extreme of trials. 



LESSONS IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE 

1. It is A fact that in all ages trouble comes upon good men which cannot 
be explained by any connection with evil doing on their part. In some cases 
the trouble comes because they are good, as in the case of Job. Job was made 
to undergo great suffering because he was so good that his faithfulness under it 
would bless all generations of men to the end of the world. 

"'There is no God,' the foolish saith, 
But none, 'There is no sorrow.'" 

(Mrs. Browning, "The Cry of the Human.") 

"God," says Davidson, "confers on some the high prerogative of suffering, 
to demonstrate to a scoffing world or an incredulous Accuser of the brethren 
what righteousness really means." The martyrs, prophets, apostles, Christ him- 
self, are examples. Many more in private life. 

Bring examples from observation and history where the good results are 
not so plain to the sufferer at the time. 

2. Note the Bearing of This on the Justice of God. — In many cases 
we can see that men would willingly, even gladly, endure the suffering if they 
could see what God saw at the time, the great blessings which would come to 
the world through them. Christ's cross is an example. 



14 PART I: THE TEST 

"They climbed the steep ascent of Heaven 
Through peril, toil and pain! 
O God, to us may grace be given 
To follow in their train." 

(Bishop Reginald Heber.) 

Many of us when we get to heaven will seek first to go to the Lord and say, 
Forgive me, Lord, for my murmurings and complaints, and accept my inmost 
thanks for the way in which thou didst lead me, and the burdens thou didst lay 
upon me. 

That cannot be unjust for which, when we understand it, we will give thanks. 

3. Does God Send Trouble? * — What is the teaching of these chapters 
upon this question? 

Trouble comes from Satan and wicked persons; as robber raids, wars, etc. 
Trouble comes from the action of the laws of God, as the lightning and the 
storm. 

The calamities of Job came by the permission of God. 

But God limited and controlled the actions of evil beings. 

God used the evils so as to work out good for Job and for the world. 

The sufferer did not know the reasons for the troubles he endured. 

But God has wise reasons for permitting them. 

4. The Relation of God to Trouble. 

1. God works by law. His laws are unchanged, inexorable. "No new 
laws, no changed laws, no unjust laws." They are such that obeyed they 
bring to man the most perfect life and character and happiness. Heaven 
is an example of what God's laws are enacted to produce, and will ever 
accomplish if men will obey them. They cannot be changed except for the 
worse. 

A lawless universe would be the worst possible. Compare the charming 
story of "Hafed's Dream of a Chance World." (Todd, "Truth Made 
Simple." 2 ) " Growth, intellectual, moral, spiritual, in every direction, means 
learning how to live in the midst of a universe on which you can count every 
time." So " God's laws for the body, obeyed, mean perfect health." (Minot 
J. Savage, "Pillars of the Temple.") 

Mr. Richard Le Gallienne has written a book, "If I were God." Ingersoll 
is reported to have said that if he were God he would have made health catching 
instead of disease. (God has made good more catching than evil.) But we 
all are thankful that those authors are not God. 

2. God has given man a free will, the power of choice, with all its pos- 
sibilities of good and evil. All the evils, the wars, the crimes, the cruelties, 
th° horrors in the history of man were made possible by this gift. But all virtue, 

JSee President Charles Cuthbert Hall's "Does God Send Trouble?" 
2 Published by Bridgman, Northampton, Mass., 1856. 



LESSONS IN THE SCHOOL OF LIFE 15 

all character, nobleness, heroism, all that makes man in the image of God, 
heaven itself — were also made possible by the same gift. 

Some writer has imagined the Creator, when before creation he was alone 
in the spaces of the universe, considering whether he should create or not. He 
thought the question through to the end. He saw the sins and evils, devils 
and bad men, which would come. He saw the good, the saints, and angels, 
the virtues as many and as bright as the stars, the new heavens and the new 
earth enduring through eternal ages. And he saw it was wise and good to 
create. 

3. Whatsoever God does himself is to help, to uplift, to make good, to 
restore, to save, to help men to conform to the good laws he has made. "God 
sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should be 
saved through him." (John iii. 17.) 

4. God for wise reasons permits evil — or else evil could not exist. 
Evils come upon us from two sources, as they did to Job. 

Some come to us through our breaking the good laws of God, so 
that we suffer the natural consequences of sin. No one should 
complain of this. 

Some come to us through the action of God's natural laws without 
any connection with the character or conduct of the sufferer; as 
by lightning and earthquake and storm, which smite alike the 
good and the evil, the missionary and the pirate. 

Many come to us through the action of other beings, from inheritance, 

from carelessness bringing accidents and disease; from evil beings, 

as wars, oppressions, murders, crimes, devastations by the armies 

of fierce chiefs and their ravaging hordes. That Satan should 

be one of these evil beings is no more strange than that history 

should be full of mighty devastators and conquerors who have 

filled the world with sorrow. Satan is not only an individual, 

but the representative and embodiment of all evil men. 

Ibsen, the Norse dramatist, " writes a drama of life which he calls 'Ghosts,' 

and shows how every player is haunted by dead ancestors, who look through 

his eyes, speak in his words, and act in his deeds." 

5. God controls and limits and uses the power of evil men to harm — or 
else he would not be God. God is in history. God is guiding the nations 
now as really as he did Israel. A professor who conducts a Sunday-school 
said to me that he would rather teach his children United States history than 
Jewish history. The difference between them, however, is twofold. Jewish 
history is divinely interpreted to us, and no other history is so written; and 
Jewish history in the Bible is a completed section of their history, so that we 
can see both the processes and the results, but modern history is still in the process 
of making. (Compare Prof. S. H. Butcher's " Harvard Lectures on Greek Sub- 
jects," Greece and Israel, p. 43.) "Nor was it until ancient Hellas ceased to 



1 6 PART I: THE TEST 

be an independent nation that it became one of the moving forces in the world's 
history. With the Greeks as with the Hebrews, the days of their abasement have 
once and again preceded their greatest triumphs; the moment of apparent over- 
throw has been the starting-point for fresh spiritual or intellectual conquest." 
There is a true sense in which God does the strange things attributed to him in 
the Old Testament. Nothing is outside of his control. He says, "Moab is my 
washpot," by means of which to cleanse Israel. Assyria is the "rod of his 
anger," by which to punish Israel's sins, to make the nation better. Cyrus 
was his instrument of returning Israel to their own land. And always his 
object is to make better and to save. 

6. God uses the laws of nature and is not imprisoned in them. He does 
not change them in order to help men, but uses them. He makes the lightning 
go where his laws would guide it, but he can keep you from being where it 
strikes. 

"When the loose mountain trembles from on high 
Shall gravitation cease if you go by? 
Or some old temple tottering to its fall 
For Chartre's head reserves the hanging wall?" 

Not at all, but you may be guided not to go by, and Chartre kept from sitting 
at that time under the hanging wall. 

All civilization is gained by man putting his will into the laws of God. He 
wishes a shower on his lawn? Then he puts in water- works and uses God's 
laws to make a shower there. He breaks no law, he changes no law. He wants 
better fruits and flowers, or horses, or dogs — and a Darwin or a Burbank uses 
God's laws to produce them. 

Now it would be a strange, impossible thing that God could not do what 
his children can do every day. A miracle changes no law, it is simply God's 
putting his mighty will into his wise laws and using them. Hence, God can 
forgive, and modify the natural effects of the laws we have broken. He can 
put his hand among the laws and save a man, as naturally as a father can save 
his child who has become entangled in the machinery of his factory, or rescue 
his son from drowning, when the natural working of the laws would destroy him. 

7. Therefore God, without changing a single law, can fulfil his promise, 
can cause that "all things shall work together for good to them that love God." 
We are not crushed individually under the great machinery of the universe 
for the general good. 

"The cold and distant conception of God," says Dr. Van Dyke, "as the 
great onlooker, 

' Who sees with equal eyes as God of all 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall ' 

is not the thought of the Bible." ("The Open Door," p. 132.) 



FIRST SOLUTION 17 

THE FIRST SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM 

THAT TROUBLE IS SOMETIMES SENT AS A TEST OF THE REALITY OF GOODNESS 

I. To the sufferer himself. No person can know himself till he has been 
tested. Even Peter did not know himself till his great test at the time of Christ's 
trial. Then he rejoiced in other, longer, harder tests that proved him to be 
true to the core. We do not sing as much as we used the hymn: 

"'Tis a point I long to know, 
Oft it causes anxious thought, 
Do I love the Lord or no, 
Am I his, or am I not?" 

(John Newton.) 

It might be wise if we did feel it more. It is a point we ought to know. 

Rogers, in his "Greyson Letters" (pp. 103-105), tells of a man who told 
him: "My conscience — a morbid one, if you will — has somehow got entangled 
with my nervous system, and I cannot think an evil thought without torture 
If I see the hungry, and feel disposed to pass them unrelieved, I seem immedi- 
ately seized with pangs of hunger myself. ... If I have any feeling of dis- 
ingenuousness, that moment my too physical conscience warns me by a film 
over my eyes; and if I were to tell a lie, I do believe she would strike me stone 
blind at once. . . . And if I am tempted to vanity just now as I was when you 
flattered me so agreeably I feel qualms at the stomach as if I had taken an 
emetic. . . . How I sigh for the power to do any one good thing unconstrained! 
— and, alas, how shall I ever be sure that I am in a condition of confirmed 
virtue while necessity thus backs conscience." 

Plato, in his "Republic," uses as an illustration the story of Gyges' Ring 
to show what is the real test of goodness. The story is that a certain Lydian 
shepherd (about 600 B.C.) found in some strange way a gold ring. Coming 
with this ring on his finger into the meeting of the shepherds making their 
monthly report of their flocks to the king, "he happened to turn the stone of 
the ring toward himself into the inner part of his hand; and when this was 
done he became invisible to those who sat beside him, and they talked of him as 
absent; and astonished at this he again handled his ring, turned the stone out- 
ward, and on turning it, became visible." He made trial of this several times, 
and found that it always had the same power. Using this power of invisibility, 
he entered the palace, slew the king, and took possession of the queen and of 
the kingdom. This shepherd thought he was a very good man, but the ring 
tested the reality of his goodness. A truly just man would be just even when 
no one would know his wrongs if he committed them. The man who was 
only seemingly and outwardly just, would commit crimes if he could do it 



18 PART I: THE TEST 

without discovery. I can know whether I am good, or wise or honest, or loving, 
or truthful, only after I have been tempted and tried. 
Learn Xavier's hymn: 

"My God, I love thee, not because 
I hope for heaven thereby; 
Nor yet because if I love not 
I must forever die. 

"Not with the hope of gaining aught, 
Not seeking a reward, 
But as thyself hast loved me, 
O ever-loving Lord." 

2. A Test for others. There is a tendency to join in Satan's sneers at the 
reality of goodness. It forms an excuse for themselves not being good. As 
Glory McWhirk said, "Anybody can be good on five thousand a year." Of 
all the sermons I heard in my college days the best remembered sentence is 
the statement made by one of the professors that whenever any one said that all 
men are dishonest we could be sure of one thing, that he was dishonest, for he 
knew himself, however little he knew of others. 

One does not know whether another has courage till that courage is tested. 
(See article on Courage in the Century Magazine for June, 1888, quoted in 
part in Peloubet's "Suggestive Illustrations on Matthew," pp. 224, 225.) 

Christ's victory over temptation, and his going to the cross, were proofs to 
the world of his heroism and love. 

Dwight L. Moody was accused, in my presence, of doing his evangelizing 
work for money. But I knew that he and Mr. Sankey had refused to accept 
for themselves the copyright on their singing books, amounting to several 
hundred thousand dollars, as rightfully theirs as any money ever earned, lest 
any one should think they were working for money. 

It was thought at one time that the Chinese converts were seeking chiefly 
"the loaves and fishes," but when the Boxer uprising came they stood the test 
and died rather than renounce God and Christ. 

One of the most difficult things in the world is rightly to judge another. 
George William Curtis in his "Prue and I" represents Mr. Titbottom with a 
pair of spectacles of such magical quality that with them he saw through all 
appearances into the real character of the person he was looking at. He looked 
at one man and saw nothing but a ledger. Another was simply a billiard cue, 
another a bank bill, another a great hog, or a wolf, or a vulgar fraction. On 
the other hand, he saw the good that others failed to see. One of his school 
teachers was a deep well of living water in which he saw the stars. Another 
was a tropical garden full of fruits and flowers. In one woman's heart lay 
concealed in the depth of character great excellences like pearls at the bottom 
of the sea, little suspected by most, but perhaps love is nothing else than the 



FIRST SOLUTION 19 

sight of them by one person. Another, called an old maid, was a white lily, 
fresh, luminous, and fragrant still. Another's nature was a tropic in which 
the sun shone, and birds sang, and flowers bloomed forever. His wrinkled 
grandmother appeared as a Madonna, "and I have yet heard of no queen, no 
belle, no imperial beauty whom in grace, and brilliancy, and persuasive courtesy 
she might not have surpassed." The way a man meets temptation, and endures 
trials, shows the world what sort of a man he is, the quality of his piety, the 
reality of his virtue. 

Search the Scriptures for examples, such as Abraham, Noah, Moses, and 
the list of heroes in Hebrews xi. 

In John ix we learn that the blind man of Jerusalem was born blind not on 
account of any sin of his own or of his parents, "but that the works of God 
should be made manifest in him." The work of God in healing him has been 
shining down nineteen centuries. Helen Keller is a similar instance of God's 
marvellous work. So Job by his sufferings has showed forth God's glory to 
the world. 



PART II 

A DISCUSSION BETWEEN JOB AND HIS 
THREE FRIENDS ON THE PROBLEM 
OF HIS SUFFERING. POETRY. (Chap- 
ters iii-xxxi.) 

THREE CYCLES OF SPEECHES 

SOLUTION: SOMETIMES SUFFERING IS A CONSEQUENCE 

AND PUNISHMENT OF SIN. BUT IT IS NOT 

FOR US TO JUDGE OTHERS 

RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

(To be assigned to different members of the class the previous lesson; and 
for class discussion.) 

i. Brief review of Part I. 

2. Geography. The place from which the three friends came, and the 
distances travelled. 

3. The character of Eliphaz. 

4. The character of Bildad. 

5. The character of Zophar. 

6. The scene. The condition and circumstances of Job as gathered from 
his speeches. 

7. The patience of Job. Does his cursing the day of his birth show that 
he was impatient? 

8. Why were the friends silent for seven days? The lesson this teaches 
as to comforting others. 

9. What was the argument of the three friends? 

10. Why cannot we judge of another's character by his sufferings? 

11. The bearing of Luke xiii. 1-5 on the problem. 

12. Were the friends right in defending the justice of God? Wherein were 
they wrong? 

13. Give a summary of Job's reply. 

14. When is affliction a natural consequence of sin? 

15. A study of Old Testament teachings as to the relation of sin and suffering. 

16. A study of the New Testament teachings on this subject. 



BLACKBOARD 



First 
Cycle 



PLAN OF THE DISCUSSION 

Silence, 7 days 
Job's Lamentation. Chapter iii 

Chapters iv, v 
vi, vii 
viii 



Eliphaz 
Job 

Bildad 
Job 

Zophar 
Job 



IX, x 

xi 

xii, xiii, xiv 



Second 
Cycle 



Eliphaz 
Job 

Bildad 
Job 

Zophar 
Job 



Chapters xv 

xvi, xvii 



xvin 
xix 
xx 
xxi 



Third 
Cycle 



Eliphaz Chapters xxii 

Job xxiii, xxiv 

Bildad " xxv 

Job xxvi-xxviii 

Job's Review of his Life " xxix, xxx 
Job's Oath of Clearance " xxxi 



Moulton's rearrangement of third cycle 



Third 
Cycle 



Eliphaz 

Job 
Bildad 

Job 
Zophar 

Job 
Job's Oath of Clearance 



Chapters xxii 



XXlll, XXIV 

xxv, xxvi. 4-10 
xxvi. 1-3; xxvii. 1-6 
xxvii. 7-xxviii. 28 
xxix, xxx 
xxxi 



22 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 



THE SCENE 1 

On the city ash heap 2 outside the walls of Uz, Job is sitting apart, groaning 
and sighing with pain, covered with boils, scraping himself with a piece of broken 
pottery to alleviate the intolerable itching, disfigured so that his friends could not 
recognize him. 

He loathed his own life. His disease clung to him like a garment, so that 
his very clothes loathed him. His bones burned with fever. They clung to his 
skin. He had become a skeleton, a brother of jackals. His roarings poured 
out like water. The terrors of God set in array against him like a hostile army 
haunted his weary nights, as he tossed to and fro through the long restless hours. 

His brothers, his familiar friends, his neighbors, kept far away and forgot 
him. The boys despised him. His enemies gaped at him. His servants re- 
fused to obey him. He was mocked by the children of those so base that in his 
prosperity he would have scourged them out of the land. Ragamuffins whose 
fathers he would have deemed unworthy to keep company with his dogs made him 
their song and byword. 

He was a poor, prematurely old man, a failure, seemingly under the curse 
of God, stripped of his glory, and seeing nothing before him but the land of dark- 
ness and the shadow of death. 

Compare Prometheus nailed to a great rock with an eagle continually 
gnawing at his vitals. (See "yEschylus" in "Ancient Classics for English 
Readers," pp. 33-62.) 

Compare also Christian in the dungeon of the castle of Giant Despair; 
but Job was without Hopeful and the Key of Promise. 

Historical Examples. — "A man like Dante or Milton," says Farrar, 
"when he stands alone, hated by princes and priests and people, retorts scorn 
for scorn, and refuses to change his voice. Yet even Dante died of a broken 
heart, and in Milton's mighty autobiographical wail of Samson Agonistes, 
amid all its trumpet-blast of stern defiance, we read the sad notes: 

'Nor am I in the list of them that hope; 

Hopeless are all my evils, all remediless, 

This one prayer yet remains, might I be heard, 

No long petition — speedy death, 

The close of all my miseries and the balm.'" 

The Coming of the Three Friendly Chiefs. — The news of Job's 
misfortune came to the ears of three chiefs, all men of mark, who were friends 

1 This description is gathered from Job's own words in his speeches, with one or two state- 
ments in the introduction. See Job ii. 7, 8; iii. 21, 22, 26; vi. 2-4; vii. 4, 5, 16; ix. 30, 31; x. 20- 
22; xvi. 8-10, 16; xvii. 2, 6, 14; xix. 0, 13-18, 20, 21; xxx. 1, 9, 10, 15, 17-19, 23, 29-31. It is a good 
exercise to go through Job's speeches to learn what he says of himself. 

2 For description of ash heap, see page 11. 



THE SCENE 23 

of Job, and they started from their distant homes to bemoan and comfort their 
afflicted friend. They probably came on camels and with something of a 
retinue and met at Uz by an appointment together. 

Eliphaz came from Teman, in Edom, the home of the descendants 
of Esau, near the southern part of the Dead Sea, perhaps one 
hundred and fifty to two hundred miles southwest of Uz. 
Bildad came from Shuah, east of Uz, toward the Euphrates, perhaps 

as far away as Eliphaz. 
Zophar came from Naamah, perhaps Maan near Petra, sixty miles 
south of the Dead Sea, half way between the Dead Sea and the 
eastern branch of the Red Sea. He would naturally pass through 
Teman on his way. 
"Probably they were all three of them nomadic princes, the sheiks of wander- 
ing clans, with whom Job had become acquainted in his travels, or in his large 
and varied intercourse with the world." (Cox, "Commentary on Job," p. 57.) 
" From their meeting-place at Teman or at Maan, they would have to make 
a journey of some two hundred miles across one of the most barren and dangerous 
deserts of Arabia — clear enough proof of their esteem for Job, and their deep 
sympathy." (Marcus Dods, D.D., "Expositor's Bible," p. 79.) 
Their Meeting with Job. (Job ii. n-13.) 

They did not recognize Job when they saw him, so disfigured and unnatural 
did he appear. They expressed their grief in the usual Oriental manner, by 
weeping aloud, 1 rending their clothes, 2 and sprinkling ashes upon their heads. 3 
Then for seven days and seven nights they were silent, not a word was spoken, 
"for they saw that his grief was very great." 

The Seven Days of Silence. — This is one of the finest touches in the 
poem. The long silence indicates the true gentleman with fine courtesy and 
true feeling. Words are vain to comfort in the depths of affliction. 

"And my comforter knows a lesson 
Wiser, truer than the rest: 
That to help and heal a sorrow 
Love and silence are always best." 

(Miss Proctor, "The Comforter.") 
So Tennyson: 

"Only silence suiteth best. 
Words, weaker than your grief, would make 
Grief more. 'Twere better I should cease." 

(To J. 5.) 

1 Cries and laments: 2 Sam. i. 17-27; iii. 33, 34; xviii. 33; 2 Kin. ii. 12; 2 Chron. zxzv. 35. 

2 Mourners rending their garments: Gen. xxxvii. 29, 34; xliv. 13; Num. xiv. 6; Jud. xi. 35; 
2 Sam. i. 2, 4; iii. 31; xiii. 19, 31; xv. 32; 2 Kin. ii. 12; v. 8; vi. 30; xi. 14; xix. 1; xxii. 11, 19; 
Ezra ix. 3, 5; Jer. xli. 5; Matt. xxvi. 65; Acts xiv. 14. 

3 Ashes and dust in mourning: Josh. vii. 6; 2 Sam. xiii. 19; 1 Kin. xx. 38; Esth. iv. 1; Rev. 
xviii. 19. 



24 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

"Wise-hearted was Sou they 's young Arabian, in watching silently the 
frantic grief of the newly childless old divine: in pitying silence Thalaba stood 
by, and gazed and listened: 'not with the officious hand of consolation, fretting 
the sore he could not hope to heal.'" (Jacox. His "Secular Annotations" 
gives a number of instances from literature.) 

"Seven days and nights, in stillness as profound 
As that of chaos, patiently ye sate 
By the heart-stricken and the desolate. 
And though your sympathy might fail to sound 
The fathomless depths of his dark spirit's wound, 
Not less your silence was sublimely great." 

(Anon, in "Poet's Bible.") 

THE GREAT DEBATE 
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CHIEF SPEAKERS 1 

Job has been characterized on page 4. 

Eliphaz was the oldest and wisest of the three. An Abraham-like saint, of a 
dignified and noble character, rather than brilliant or learned; "with a 
considerable likeness to Job himself in the general cast of his character 
and his tone of thought." Firm in his opinions; of plain common sense. 
He gives by far the noblest, gentlest, and most artistic expressions of the 
convictions and sentiments common to all. " He has been brought into 
closer and more intimate intercourse with heaven than his fellows, and like 
Balaam, another son of the ancient East, is a seer of visions and a dreamer 
of dreams." (See Cox, "Commentary on Job," p. 55.) 

Cary calls him a Venerable Theologian, and a Deep Thinker. 

Bildad was a sage, a man of literary culture, a treasure-house of the priceless 
wisdom of the ancients. He quotes the proverbs of the sages, and bases his 
opinions on the traditions of the fathers, whom he frequently cites. 
Cary calls him a Traditionalist. 

Zophar was the ordinary good man of his day, with a commonplace mind, 
savoring of bigotry, and uttering common thoughts in a commonplace 
manner. " The man who implicitly believes what he is taught, and demands 
not only that every one else should believe it, but in the very forms which 
commended the truth to him." 

"He is sharp and bitter ... he put a coarse tearing edge on the insinua- 
tions of his companions; and prided himself, I dare say, on being a plain, 
blunt man who said what he meant, and meant what he said." He calls 
Job "a windbag," "a babbler," "an empty pate," "a wild ass's colt." 

1 Derived from the words of the speakers themselves. It is a good exercise for each scholar 
to make such a study for himself. 



JOB'S LAMENTATION 25 

"Having no familiar acquaintance with the voice of wisdom, no divine 
vision to fall back upon, he delivers his commonplace opinions with an 
air of authority. He has a touch of £ I am Sir Oracle, let no dog bark.'" 
(See Froude, "Essay on Job," and Cox, "Commentary on Job," p. 55.) 

The Audience consisted of ELmu, the brothers and kinsmen of Job, neigh- 
bors, citizens, curiosity-mongers, servants, children, visitors. 

Unseen, but present, were God, angels, and "a great cloud of witnesses" 
interested in the test. And the Adversary watching the result of his endeavors 
to make Job fail. 

READINGS m CHARACTER. 

Selections from each speaker giving the gist of the argumeyit and the passages 
of special note. 

The whole discussion should be read at home. 

All the selections given below from the Great Debate should be read at one 
time in the class. 



JOB'S LAMENTATION. (Chapter iii.) 
Job. 

"Let the day perish wherein I was born. 

Let that day be darkness; 
Let not God regard it from above, 
Neither let the light shine upon it! 

Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it for then- 
own; 
Let a cloud dwell upon it; 
Let all that maketh black the day terrify it ! 
Let the stars of the twilight thereof be dark! 
Let it look for light, but have none; 
Neither let it behold the eyelids of the morning. 
Why died I not from the womb ? 
For now should I have lien down and been quiet; 
I should have slept; then had I been at rest: 

With kings and counsellors of the earth. 
There the wicked cease from troubling; 
And there the wean* be at rest. 



26 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, 
And life unto the bitter in soul; 

Which long for death, but it cometh not; 

And dig for it more than for hid treasures. 
For the thing which I fear cometh upon me, 
And that which I am afraid of cometh unto me." ' 



"Curse" in verse i is not the same word which Job's wife uses in A. V., 
where she bids Job to "curse," i. e., "renounce" God and die. 
Compare Shakespeare's "King Richard," exclaiming: 

"My large kingdom for a little grave, 
A little, little grave, an obscure grave." 

("King Richard II," Act iii, Sc. 3.) 

The first eighteen sections of Tennyson's "In Memoriam" are strikingly 
parallel to Job's Lament in this chapter and to his first answer to Eliphaz, 
chapters vi, vii. 

Sophocles in "CEdipus Colonnus" expresses "in sharpest form the ruling 
thought of the first two strophes of Job's curse." 

Shakespeare in one of his finest passages seems to have had this chapter in 
his eye, as in "King John" (Act. iii, Sc. 1), the speech of Constance beginning 
"A wicked day and not a holy day," and in a later passage (Act iii, Sc. 4), "O 
amiable and lovely death!" etc. 

" The eyelids of the morning " (iii. 9). A beautiful picture. The morning 
rays streaming through the opening clouds seem "like the light of the eyes of day 
pouring through its opening lids and lashes." Sophocles ("Antigone," 103) 
speaks of "the eyelid of the golden day." Milton ("Lycidas," 26) speaks of 
"the opening eyelids of the morn." 

"The thing which I feared is come upon me" (iii. 25). The element of 
fear (not fear of God, but of future evil, anxiety) seems to have been too large 
an element in his piety, and it was intensified by his disease. "Gloomy and 
terrifying apprehensions are one of the most painful symptoms of Elephantiasis. 
Genung says that one important result of Job's trial will be to change his piety 
from negative to positive, from fear to love." (" Epic of the Inner Life," p. 150.) 

"A curious illustration . . . occurs in Dean Swift's writings. Swift's 
melancholy habit of 'lamenting his birthday' by reading the third chapter of 
Job is familiar to all interested in his life." (Bradley, "Lecture on Job," p. 19.) 

The Patience of Job. — A number of the writers on Job speak as if Job 
lost his patience in this discussion; that is, at the time when his patience was 

1 Job iii. 3-5, o, 11, 13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 25. 



JOB'S LAMENTATION 27 

most severely tried. But it is these very expressions of deep feeling which 
prove his patience. If he had been a marble statue or a being "carved in ice"; 
if he were sitting "like patience on a monument, smiling at grief," he would 
have shown no strong feeling about his wrongs, for he would have had none. 
But it does not require patience in such a being to keep from complaining. Job 
was fighting a terrible battle, but he held on till he gained the victory. His 
complaints prove the intensity of his feelings; and yet he never lost his faith, never 
yielded to the tempter. That is patience. Just as courage is not indifference 
to danger, nor ignorance of it, but a going straightforward in the path of duty 
when the greatness of the danger is so realized as to blanch the cheeks, and 
almost stop the beating of the heart. Two soldiers were charging up a hill 
with their regiment, in a desperate attempt to capture a battery. "When half 
way up, one of them turned to the other, and said, 'Why, you are as pale as a 
sheet; you look like a ghost; I believe you are afraid.' 'Yes, I am,' was the 
answer; 'and, if you were half as much afraid as I am, you'd have run long 
ago.'" Some one reported to Napoleon that one of his officers turned pale 
when ordered to a dangerous duty. "That officer," replied Napoleon, "is one 
of the bravest in the whole army; he sees most clearly the danger, but will do 
his duty in spite of it." (See Century Magazine for June, 1888.) 

Mr. Howard in his life of Henry Clay Trumbull tells how as chaplain he so 
dreaded the first battle that he turned to his servant and said: "If you see me 
turning back, shoot me." No man was braver. Often the timid, who dread 
the smallest things, are far more courageous than those who physically have no 
thought of fear. In my first parish at Gloucester, my wife and I went out in a 
wherry after a storm. The fishermen said we did not know enough to be 
afraid. 

These illustrations apply equally to patience. Many a person of shattered 
nerves, weakened by depressing disease, who is fretful and impatient, may be 
really far more patient than the well persons who criticise him. 1 

'"Tis all men's office to speak patience 
To those writhing under the bond of sorrow; 
But no man's virtue, nor sufficiency, 
To be so moral when he shall endure 
The like himself." 

("Much Ado About Nothing," Act v, Sc. 1.) 

1 Compare Christ's word from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 
(Matt, xxvii. 46); David's grief over Absalom (2 Sam. xviii. 33); Psalm cxxx, "Out of the depths 
have I cried unto thee." 



28 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

THE FIRST CYCLE OF SPEECHES. (Chapters iv-xiv.) 

Eliphaz (chapters iv, v). 

If one essay to commune with thee, wilt thou be grieved? 
But who can withhold himself from speaking? 

Behold, thou hast instructed many, 

And thou hast strengthened the weak hands. 

Thy words have upholden him that was falling, 

And thou hast confirmed the feeble knees. 

But now it is come unto thee, and thou faintest; 

It toucheth thee, and thou art troubled. 

Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? 
Or where were the upright cut off? 

According as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, 
And sow trouble, reap the same. 

By the breath of God they perish, 

And by the blast of his anger are they consumed. 

In thoughts from the visions of the night, 

When deep sleep falleth on men, 

Fear came upon me and trembling, 

Which made all my bones to shake. 

Then a spirit passed before my face; 

The hair of my flesh stood up. 

It stood still, but I could not discern the appearance thereof; 

A form was before mine eyes : 

There was silence, and I heard a voice, saying, 
" Shall mortal man be more just than God ? 
Shall a man be more pure than his Maker ? " 

For affliction cometh not forth of the dust, 

Neither doth trouble spring out of the ground; 
But man is born unto trouble, 

As the sparks fly upward. 



FIRST CYCLE: JOB 29 

But as for me, I would seek unto God, 

And unto God would I commit my cause. 
Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: * 
Therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty. 
For he maketh sore, and bindeth up; 

He woundeth, and his hands make whole. 

He shall deliver thee in six troubles; 

Yea, in seven there shall no evil touch thee. 

Lo this, we have searched it, so it is; 

Hear it, and know thou it for thy good. 2 

Compare Milton's description of death (in "Paradise Lost," ii. 266): 

"If shape it could be called that shape had none 
Distinguishable in member, joint or limb; 
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed." 

Job iv. 17 is not a mere truism, as some say, but contains the gist of his 
argument — a good man would not inflict punishment on one who had done 
right. Much more is such injustice impossible with God. Therefore, Job 
must have done some great wrong. The flaw in his argument is that he takes 
for granted that all suffering is a punishment, which the Prologue, as we have 
seen, shows to be a false assumption. This false argument Eliphaz states in 
several ways in this speech — either God is unjust, and therefore not God, or 
Job is a sinner. 

Job (chapters vi, vii). 

Oh that my vexation were but weighed, 

And my calamity laid in the balances together! 

For now it would be heavier than the sand of the seas: 
Therefore have my words been rash. 

To him that is ready to faint 

Kindness should be shewed from his friend; 

Even to him that forsaketh the fear of the Almighty. 



1 See Ps. xciv. 12; cvii; Heb. xii. 5-11. 

2 Job iv. 1-5, 7-9, 13, 17; v. 6-8, 17-19, 27. See Byron, "Hebrew Melodies;" From 



Job. 



30 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, 

As the channel of brooks that pass away. 

Did I say, "Give unto me?" 1 

Or, "Offer a present for me of your substance?" 

Or, "Deliver me from the adversary's hand?" 

Or, "Redeem me from the hand of the oppressors?" 

Teach me and I will hold my peace; 

And cause me to understand wherein I liave erred. 
How forcible are words of uprightness! 

But what doth your arguing reprove? 
Yea, ye would cast lots upon the fatherless, 
And make merchandise of your friend. 

(The Friends, vexed at the reproof, rise 
and consult together.) 2 

Now therefore be pleased to look upon me; 
For surely I shall not lie to your face. 

(The Friends are turning to go away.) 2 

Return, I pray you, let there be no injustice. 

(The Friends sit down again.) 2 

Is there not a warfare 3 to man upon earth ? 
Are not his days like the days of an hireling? 

As a servant that earnestly desireth the shadow, 4 

The night is long; 
And I am full of tossing to and fro unto the dawning of the day. 

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, 

And are spent without hope. 
As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away. 

1 Did I ask you to come and help me? Why then come as if you were my friends, and then 
disappoint me so? 

2 These italics are from Cary. Renan suggests the same thought, that, stung by the irony 
and keen reproaches of Job, the friends make a movement to retire. 

3 Margin, "a time of service." 

4 Shadow on the sun dial, showing that the day is ending. 



FIRST CYCLE: JOB $1 

(To God.) 

Am I a sea or a sea-monster, 

That thou settest a watch over me? 
Then thou scarest me with dreams, 
And terrifiest me through visions : 
So that my soul chooseth strangling, 
And death rather than these my bones. 

I loathe my life; 

I would not live alway; 
Let me alone; 
For my days are vanity. 

What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him, 
And that thou shouldest set thine heart upon him, 
And that thou shouldest visit him every morning ? * 

The Oriental brooks running through the rocky ravines become suddenly 
torrents after a rain, because there are no forests to hold the water back. In the 
hot, dry season, the bed of the brook is dry, when the thirsty traveller is most in 
need of water. So swiftly, so disappointingly disappeared the human sympathy 
and love Job longed for. "O the pity of it, the pity of it!" 

I have heard Henry Ward Beecher during his great trial in one of his prayer 
meetings define his position by an experience of his in the exciting antislavery 
times. He with another speaker were mobbed at a meeting in the city. They 
escaped by a back exit, but were followed by the mob. He entered a certain 
house, but the mob thought he was in the house opposite, which they attacked 
with stones, rotten eggs and every kind of missile. All this time Mr. Beecher 
was calmly looking on from his safe retreat. "It did not harm me," he said, 
"for I was not there." 

Job was deprived of sleep 

"That knits up the ravel'd sleave of care, 
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, 
Balm of hurt minds." 

("Macbeth," Act ii, Sc. i.) 

"A sea, or a sea-monster " (vii, 12). The sea itself is sometimes likened to 
one of its monsters " twisting about the land and at times invading and destroy- 

1 Job vi. 2, 3, 14, is, 22, 25, 27-29; vii. 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14-18. For a parallel to this 
pathetic description of life, see Deut. xxviii. 65-67. 



32 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

ing" and requiring transcendent power to tame and restrain it with God's 
"Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further, and here shall thy proud waves be 
stayed." (Job xxxviii. n.) 

The "sea-monster" was the untamable crocodile, or one of those monstrous 

"dragons of the prime 
That tare each other in their slime." 

Job complains " that he, a man, 'noble in reason, infinite in faculty,'" with 
a conscience and heart, "should be handled roughly and severely as though 
like sea or monster he were devoid of sense and reason." (Cox, " Commentary 
on Job," p. 108.) 

Contrast Job vii. 17 with Ps. viii. 3, 4, one of the older Psalms. As if God 
instead of being mindful of man and visiting him in order to help and comfort 
and save, visited him every morning to test and try him. So Stead in his "If 
Christ Came to Chicago," represents Christ as searching for all kinds of evil, 
but looking for very little good. 

Bildad (chapter viii). 

How long wilt thou speak these things? 

And how long shall the words of thy mouth be like a mighty wind? 

Doth God pervert judgment? 

Or doth the Almighty pervert justice? 

If thy children have sinned against him, 

And he have delivered them into the hand of their transgression: 
If thou wouldest seek diligently unto God, 
And make thy supplication to the Almighty; 
If thou wert pure and upright; 

Surely now he would awake for thee, 

And make the habitation of thy righteousness prosperous. 

For inquire, I pray thee, of the former age, 

And apply thyself to that which their fathers have searched out: 

(For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing). 

Can the flag grow without water? 

Whilst it is yet in its greenness, and not cut down, 

It withereth before any other herb. 
So are the paths of all that forget God; 
And the hope of the godless man shall perish: 



FIRST CYCLE: JOB 33 

Behold, God will not cast away a perfect man, 
Neither will he uphold the evil-doers. 1 

In Bildad's speech the doctrine of Eliphaz is reasserted with more heat and 
based upon appeals to nature and tradition. 

Bildad appeals to three proverbs: (i) that of the "Reed and the Rush," 
vs. 11-13; (2) of "the Spider's Web," vs. 14, 15; (3) of "the Gourd," vs. 16-18. 
(see Cox, "Commentary on Job," pp. 114-116.) 

Job (chapters ix, x). 

Of a truth I know that it is so: 

But how can man be just with God? 

If he be pleased to contend with him 

He cannnot answer him one of a thousand. 
Who hath hardened himself against him and prospered? 
Which removeth the mountains and they know it not, 
Which alone stretcheth out the heavens, 
And treadeth upon the waves of the sea. 
Which maketh the Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades, 
And the chambers of the south. 
Which doeth great things past finding out; 
Yea, marvellous things without number. 

If I say, "I will forget my complaint, 
I will put off my sad countenance, 
And be of good cheer:" 

I am afraid of all my sorrows, 

I know that thou wilt not hold me innocent, 

I shall be condemned. 
If I wash myself with snow water, 
And make my hands never so clean; 

Yet wilt thou plunge me in the ditch, 

And mine own clothes shall abhor me. 
For he is not a man as I am, that I should answer him. 
There is no daysman betwixt us. 

1 Job viii. 2-6, 8, o, 11-13, 20. 



34 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

That might lay his hand upon us both. 
Then would I speak and not fear him. 

{To God.) 
If I sin, 
Then thou markest me, 

If I be wicked, 

Woe unto me; 

And if I be righteous, 

Yet shall I not lift up my head. 

Thou huntest me as a lion. 1 

{To the Friends.) 
Are not my days few? Cease then, 
And let me alone, that I may take comfort a little, 
Before I go whence I shall not return, 
Even to the land of darkness and of the shadow of death. 2 

"Bear, Orion, Pleiades" (ix. 9) are the modern names of these constella- 
tions, which with one exception are the same as Vulcan wrought upon the disk 
of the massy shield which the goddess Thetis had begged for her son Achilles. 
(See Homer's "Iliad," xviii. 486-89.) 

"Chambers of the south" (ix. 9), the storehouses of the rain; or "the vast 
starry groups of the southern hemisphere." (Cox, "Commentary on Job," 
p. 123.) 

"Wash myself with snow water" (ix. 30); compare Ps. li. 7: "Wash me and 
I shall be whiter than snow," and the exquisite poem "Beautiful Snow," 3 
beginning "Oh the snow! the beautiful snow!" 

" Once I was pure as the snow, but I fell, 
Fell like the snowflake, from heaven to hell; 
Fell to be trampled as filth in the street; 
Fell to be scoffed at, derided, and beat. 
Pleading, 

Cursing, 

Dreading to die, 
Selling my soul to whoever would buy. 

1 As a lion hunts for his prey. 

2 Job ix. 2-5, 8-10, 27-33, 35*. x. 14-16, 20, 21. See clear description of Sheol among early 
Hebrew beliefs in Professor Orr's " Christian View of God and His World," Appendix to Lecture V. 

3 In "Snowflakes," p. 69 (Am. Tract Soc), quoted largely in Peloubet's "Suggestive 
Illustrations on Acts," p. 334. (Holman.) 



FIRST CYCLE: ZOPHAR 35 

Merciful God! have I fallen so low? 

And yet I was once like the beautiful snow 

Father, mother, sisters, all — 

God and myself I have lost by my fall. 

Helpless and foul as the trampled snow, 
Sinner, despair not! Christ stoopeth low 
To rescue the soul that is lost in its sin, 
And raise it to life and enjoyment again- 
Groaning, 

Bleeding, 

Dying for thee, 
The crucified hung on the accursed tree. 
His accents of pity fall soft on thine ear. 
'Is there mercy for me? Will He heed my weak prayer? 
O God, in the stream that for sinners did flow, 
Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow!'" 

In Lockman's Fable the black man rubs his body with snow in order to 
make it white. 

"A daysman" (ix. 33), a mediator, an umpire (so named as having the 
appointment of a day for hearing the cause). Here is expressed the human 
need of a Saviour who should be both God and man. "Job, like Plato, was 
profoundly sure that he should never know God as he needed to know Him until 
some man or spirit was sent to reveal God to his longing soul." Again in xvi. 
19, he feels more sure of the advocate; and in xix. 25, he can say "I know that 
my Redeemer liveth." 



Zophar (chapter xi). 

Should not the multitude of words be answered? 
And should a man full of talk be justified? 
Should thy boastings make men hold their peace? 

But Oh that God would speak, 

And open his lips against thee; 
Know therefore that God exacteth of thee 
Less than thine iniquity deserveth. 

Canst thou by searching find out God? 

Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? 

It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? 

Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know? 



36 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

The measure thereof is longer than the earth, 

And broader than the sea. 

If iniquity be in thine hand, put it far away, 

And let not unrighteousness dwell in thy tent, 
And thy life shall be clearer than the noonday; 
Though there be darkness, it shall be as the morning. 

But the eyes of the wicked shall fail, 

And they shall have no way to flee, 

And their hope shall be the giving up of the ghost. 1 

Job (chapters xii-xiv). 

No doubt but ye are the people, 
And wisdom shall die with you. 

But I have understanding as well as you; 

I am not inferior to you: 

Yea, who knoweth not such things as these? 

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; 
And the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee; 
Or, speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee; 
And the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. 
Who knoweth not in all these 
That the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? 
In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, 
And the breath of all mankind. 

Surely I would speak to the Almighty, 
And I desire to reason with God. 

But ye are forgers of lies, 

Ye are all physicians of no value. 

Oh that ye would altogether hold your peace! 

And it should be your wisdom. 

Man that is born of a woman 
Is of few days and full of trouble. 

1 Job xi. i, 2, 3, s, 7-9, 14, 17, 20 



FIRST CYCLE: RESULTANT 37 

He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down. 
He fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not. 

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, 
That it will sprout again. 

Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, 
And the stock thereof die in the ground; 
Yet through the scent of water it will bud, 
And put forth boughs, like a plant. 
But man dieth, and wasteth away: 
Yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? 
As the waters fail from the sea, 
And the river decayeth and drieth up; 
So man lieth down and riseth not; 
Till the heavens be no more they shall not awake, 
Nor be roused out of their sleep. 

If a man die, shall he live again? 

All the days of my warfare would I wait, till my release should 



The only time that the name Jehovah occurs in the poetical part of the book 
is in verse 9 of chapter xii. There may be a reference to Job's words when he 
was told of the death of his children. (Job i. 21.) 

"Warfare" (xii. 14) means rather "a time of service," as of a soldier in 
the hard toil of the campaign waiting for the time appointed for his discharge. 

Job's thoughts take, in verse 7 of chapter xiv, a more hopeful turn: "Man 
die while even trees live on? Impossible!" So Job speaks out his yearning 
and his hope. We have here a picture of faith struggling for a revelation from 
the unseen Beyond. Compare Tennyson's "In Memoriam," xliii: "If sleep 
and death be truly one," etc. 

The Resultant of the First Round of the Debate 

1. Job won a logical victory over the Friends. They had little to urge except 
that the Heavens are just, "and of our pleasant vices make instruments to 
plague us." But Job was conscious that he was innocent of the secret vices 
with which they charged him. 

1 Job xii. 2, 3, 7-10; xiii. 3-5; xiv. 1, 2, 7-12, 14. 



38 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

2. He had refuted and conquered the great Adversary, Satan, the Accuser. 
He had not renounced God. He was enabled to trust God and preserve his 
allegiance to him. Othello finely complains (Act iv, Sc. 2) : 

"Had it pleased Heaven 
To try me with affliction; had he rained 
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head, 
Steeped me in poverty to the very lips, 
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes; 
I should have found in some place of my soul 
A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me 
The fixed figure of the time for scorn 
To point his slow and moving finger at! 
Yet could I bear that too; well, very well." 

Job had borne both trials which Othello affirms that he could have borne 
with patience. So far from renouncing God who no longer loaded him with 
benefits, he was led by his very deprivations and miseries to a clearer knowledge 
of him, a more assured and triumphant faith in him. 

3. Besides his victory over the Friends, and his far greater victory over the 
Adversary, Job carries off, as the spoils of victory, at least an inkling or two of 
the greatest truths even now revealed to man — a presentiment both of the In- 
carnation and of the Resurrection from the dead. 

Compare Wordsworth's experience, as given in his poem: 

'And when the stream 
Which overflowed the soul was passed away, 
A consciousness remained that it had left, 
Deposited upon the silent shore 
Of memory, images and precious thoughts 
That shall not die, and cannot be destroyed." 
("Excursion," Bk. vii.) (From Cox, "Commentary on Job," pp. 177-80.) 



THE SECOND CYCLE OF SPEECHES 

It is probable that an interval of time lies between the different cycles of 
speaking, a time for meditation, and settling of opinions. But there is no change 
in the argument, except more intense and passionate utterances, and a firmer 
conviction on the part of each one that he is right, while Job grows more calm 
and self-possessed. 

The Scene is the same as before. 

The starting point is the claim on both sides of a pre-eminent acquaintance 
with Divine Wisdom. 



Eliphaz (chapter xv). 

Should a wise man make answer with vain knowledge, 

And fill his belly with the east wind? 
Should he reason with unprofitable talk, 

Or with speeches wherewith he can do no good? 
Thine own mouth condemneth thee, and not I; 

Yea, thine own lips testify against thee. 

Art thou the first man that was born? 

Or wast thou brought forth before the hills? 
Hast thou heard the secret counsel of God? 

And dost thou restrain wisdom to thyself? 
What knowest thou, that we know not? 

Are the consolations of God too small for thee? 

What is man, 

That he should be clean? 
And he which is born of a woman, 

That he should be righteous? 
Behold, he putteth no trust in his holy ones; 
Yea, the heavens are not clean in his sight. 
How much less one that is abominable and corrupt, 
A man that drinketh iniquity like water! 

39 



40 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

I will shew thee, hear thou me; 

And that which I have seen I will declare: 

(Which wise men have told 

From their fathers.) 

The wicked man travaileth with pain all his days, 

Even the number of years that are laid up for the oppressor. 

A sound of terrors is in his ears; 

In prosperity the spoiler shall come upon him: 

Distress and anguish make him afraid. 

Because he hath stretched out his hand against God, 

And behaveth himself proudly against the Almighty; 

He runneth upon him with a stiff neck, 

With the thick bosses of his bucklers. 
He shall shake off his unripe grape as the vine, 
And shall cast off his flower as the olive. 1 



"A wise man" (xv. 2). Eliphaz was older than Job, came from Teman, 
a place noted for its wisdom, and, "evidently prides himself on belonging to 
the guild of wise men." 

"East wind" (xv. 2). "Puff himself up, and then bring out of his mouth 
violent blasts of mere barren words" (Hos. xii. 1). ("Cambridge Bible," 
p. 109.) 

"The first man" (xv. 7), and therefore summing up all the wisdom of the 
world. Compare the ironical proverb of the Hindoos: "Yes indeed, he was the 
first man; no wonder that he is wise." 

President Charles Cuthbert Hall founds his book " Does God Send Trouble ?" 
on this verse eleven of the fifteenth chapter. The consolations Eliphaz refers to 
are those the three friends had been giving Job, thinking them derived from 
God. 

"From their fathers " (xv. 18). "The gray-headed and the very aged men, 
much elder than thy father." He now presents a string of maxims and oracles 
from the fathers. These maxims are true, but evidently Eliphaz applies them 
to Job. 

"A stiff neck" (xv. 26), "like a bull, which rushes blindly against whatever 
arouses its wrath." 

"Bosses" (xv. 26) are the knobs on the convex part of the shield, facing 
the foe. "Buckler," a shield fastened with a buckle. 

1 Job xv. 2, 3, 6-9, 11, 14-18, 20, 21, 24-26, 33. 



SECOND CYCLE: JOB 41 

The vine when it fruits is very open to various forms of disease in which its 
unripened grapes fall like leaves in the autumn. 

The Syrian olive bears very copiously every other year. But even in the 
years when it rests from bearing it blossoms, the blossoms falling off before the 
berry is formed. "In the spring one may see the bloom, on the slightest breath 
of wind shed like snowflakes and perishing by millions." (From Cox, "Com- 
mentary on Job," p. 197.) 



Job (chapters xvi, xvii). 

I have heard many such things: 

Miserable comforters are ye all. 
I also could speak as ye do; 

If your soul were in my soul's stead, 
I could join words together against you, 

And shake mine head at you. 
But I would strengthen you with my mouth, 

And the solace of my lips should assuage your grief. 

Mine adversary sharpeneth his eyes upon me. 

They have gaped upon me with their mouth; 

They have smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully: 

They gather themselves together against me. 

God delivereth me to the ungodly, 

Although there is no violence in mine hands, 

And my prayer is pure. 

O earth, cover not thou my blood, 

And let my cry have no resting place. 

Even now, behold, my Witness is in heaven, 

And He that voucheth for me is on high. 

My friends scorn me: 

But mine eye poureth out tears unto God; 

That he would maintain the right of a man with God, 

And of a son of man with his neighbor. 1 

1 The margin reads for these last two lines : 

"That one might plead for a man with God, 
As a son of man pleadeth for his neighbor." 



42 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

But return ye, all of you, and come now! 
And I shall not find a wise man among you. 

If I look for Sheol as mine house; 

If I have spread my couch in the darkness; 

If I have said to corruption, Thou art my father; 

To the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister; 

Where then is my hope? x 



"Miserable comforters" (xvi. 2) in reply to Eliphaz's question (xv. fi), "Are 
the consolations of God too small for thee?" The friends were giving just the 
reverse of consolation. 

Job is beginning, in xvi. 10, to distinguish between the God pictured by his 
friends who afflicts him because He hates him, and the true God who loves 
him while He afflicts him. 

The best commentary on this outburst of resentment at the Friends' consola- 
tions is found in a passage from "Much Ado About Nothing" (Act v, Sc. 1), 
in which Shakespeare may have had this plaint of Job in mind. Leonato, 
maddened with grief, says: 

"I pray thee cease thy counsel 
Which falls into mine ear as profitless 
As water in a sieve: give me not counsel; 
Nor let no comforter delight mine ear 
But such an one whose wrongs do suit with mine. 
Bring me a father that so loved his child, 
Whose joy of her is overwhelm'd like mine, 
And bid him speak of patience. 
If such an one will smile and stroke his beard, 
Patch grief with proverb; bring him yet to me 
And I of him will gather patience." 

"And my prayer is pure," (xvi. 17). "A profound yet very practical test 
of one's integrity before God. One is reminded of Coleridge's ' Ancient Mariner,' 
who relates that as soon as he could look on God's creatures with love instead 
of hatred, 'that self -same moment I could pray.'" 

Compare Job xvi. 18 with the challenge of Queen Constance: 

"Arm, arm, you heavens, against these perjured kings!" (Shakespeare, 
"King John," Act hi, Sc. 1.) 

"Witness" (xvi. 19), Advocate, the Daysman of ix. 33. 

1 Job xvi. 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 17-21; xvii. io, 13-15. 



SECOND CYCLE: BILDAD 43 

Bildad (chapter xviii). 

How long will ye lay snares for words? 

Consider, and afterwards we will speak. 
Wherefore are we counted as beasts, 

And are become unclean in your sight? 

Thou that tearest thyself in thine anger, 

Shall the earth be forsaken for thee? 

Or shall the rock be removed out of its place? 

Yea, the light of the wicked shall be put out, 

And the spark of his fire shall not shine. 
And his own counsel shall cast him down. 

For he is cast into a net by his own feet, 

And he walketh upon the toils. 
And calamity shall be ready for his halting. 
And he shall be brought to the king of terrors. 

And chased out of the world. 
Such are the dwellings of the unrighteous, 

And this is the place of him that knoweth not God. 1 



All of Bildad's proverbial sayings are allusions to Job's character and 
sufferings, and he evidently intended that Job should see his own portrait in 
the picture. 

"Web . . . toils." In verses 8-10 the poet brings together all, or nearly 
all, the Hebrew names for the various kinds of nets and traps. We see the sinner 
who once strode along "the primrose path," now creeping along through dark 
and pathless shades strewn with traps and snares, starting at the fall of every 
leaf, peopling the darkness with spectres, often pausing to listen, in the vain 
hope of escaping the visible and invisible perils to which he is exposed. 

"When all that is within him doth condemn 
Itself for being there." 

(Cox, "Commentary on Job," p. 225.) 

1 Job xviii. 2-5, 7, 8, 12, 14, 18, as. 



44 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

Job (chapter xix). 

How long will ye vex my soul, 

And break me in pieces with words? 
These ten times have ye reproached me: 

Ye are not ashamed that ye deal hardly with me. 

Behold I cry out of wrong but I am not heard. 
He hath stripped me of my glory, 

And taken the crown from my head. 
He hath broken me down on every side, and I am gone: 

And mine hope hath he plucked up like a tree. 

He hath put my brethren far from me, 

And mine acquaintance are wholly estranged from me. 
My kinsfolk have failed, 

And my familiar friends have forgotten me. 
They that dwell in mine house, and my maids, 

Count me for a stranger. 
Even young children despise me; 

If I arise, they speak against me. 
All my inward friends abhor me: 

And they whom I loved are turned against me. 
My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, 

And I am escaped with the skin of my teeth. 



Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, 

O ye my friends, 
For the hand of God hath touched me! 



Oh that my words were now written! 
Oh that they were inscribed in a book! 
That with an iron pen and lead 
They were graven in the rock for ever! 



SECOND CYCLE: JOB 45 

inscription on ttje rocft* 

For I know that my Redeemer liveth, 

And that He shall stand up at the last upon the earth; 

And after my skin hath been thus destroyed, 

Yet from my flesh shall I see God! 

Whom I shall see for myself, 1 

And mine eyes shall behold and not another. 

— My reins are consumed within me — 

{He nearly faints. A pause.) 
If ye say, How we will persecute him! 
Be ye afraid of the sword: 
That ye may know there is a judgment. 2 



Job acknowledges his sufferings, how could he help it? His words should 
have touched them with pity. But he denies Bildad's accusation that it was 
his own conduct that brought these things upon him. It was God that had sent 
his affliction; and his friends and neighbors made it harder to bear. But God 
would vindicate him from all the false aspersions cast upon him, would deliver 
him from his afflictions. 

"Oh, that my words" (xix. 23), referring to the six lines beginning with 
"I know that my Redeemer liveth," which Job desired to have inscribed in 
book and on rock to endure as long as the memory of the sufferer survived 
among men, as his dying testimony to the goodness and justice of God. 

" Iron and lead." (xix. 24.) The iron engraved the words on the rock, and 
molten lead was poured into the lines thus made to make them both more legible 
and permanent. The statement of Job's faith in a Redeemer, says Chrysostom, 
has been written far more durably than on rock with pen of iron. " They are 
graven on the Rock of God's Word, and there they are still read, and minister 
comfort to all generations." 

"I know that my Redeemer liveth." These six lines (xix. 25-27) have 
attracted more attention and have been more variously interpreted than any 
other passage in the book. For these opinions see the commentators. Here 
there is only room for a brief statement of what seems to be the true interpreta- 
tion. 

1 Margin, "on my side. 

J Job xix. a, 3, 7, 9, 10, 13-15. 18-21, 23-29. 



46 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

"My Redeemer," Hebrew, my "Goel." The word denotes the next of 
kin, whose duty it was to avenge the blood of a murdered man (see Num. 
xxxv. 19), and to succor the bereaved and needy (see Ruth iii. 9-13; iv. 1-8). 
(Genung, "Epic of the Inner Life," p. 236.) 

" The term redeemer (Heb. goel) is frequently used of God as the deliverer 
of his people out of captivity, e. g., very often in Is. xl, seq. (xlix. 7, 26; liv. 
5, 8), and also as the deliverer of individuals from distress (Gen. xlviii. 16; Ps. 
xix. 14; ciii. 4). . . . Thus the ideas of Goel and Redeemer virtually coin- 
cide." (Davidson, "Cambridge Bible," p. 143.) 

He had longed for a Daysman; he hoped for an Advocate; now he knows 
that his Redeemer, the Vindicator of his innocence, the Deliverer from his 
troubles, is the Living God. 

"He shall stand" (xix. 25), arise, appear, come forward as a witness, do a 
kinsman's part for me. 

"Upon the earth;" most prefer "over my dust." "Over my grave" he 
will appear for me, clad in robes of victory and justice. 

"And after my skin" (xix. 26), probably his body, for Job had just com- 
plained (ver. 20) that nothing was left of him but skin and bone; after the last 
fibre of his body had been consumed. 

"Hath been thus destroyed" (probably pointing to his emaciated frame). 
The verb implies extreme violence, as if his disease were a wild beast rending 
and ravaging his body. The meaning is "when I have died under the ravages 
of my disease." 

"Yet from my flesh." The Hebrew preposition is variously translated 
"from," "in," "out of," "without." "From" is the literal translation and 
may mean (1) in my flesh — Job in his body, looking out from his body, sees 
God. Or (2) it may mean free from, stripped from his body, he as a spirit will 
see God. 

There are some curious examples of this double sense of " from " in Shake- 
speare, as in "Richard III," Act iv, Sc. 4, in the dialogue between King Richard 
and Queen Elizabeth; and in "King Lear," Act ii, Sc. 1, Regan says, "To 
answer from our home." 

"Whom I shall see for myself" (xix. 27), and not through the report of 
another. Death does not end all with him. He will be alive beyond death 
and enjoy his vindication. "The early Hebrews had no manner of doubt, any 
more than we have, that the soul or spiritual part of man survived the body." 
(Prof. James Orr of Glasgow.) * 

This passage is one of those outbursts of hope, those glimpses of victory in 
the great battle which Job was waging, which are like the songs of triumph — 
the song of Moses and the Lamb, and the glimpses of final redemption, which 
emerge now and then in the great conflict of the Kingdom of Heaven in Revela- 

1 See Prof. Max Miiller's "Anthropological Religion, or Belief in Immortality in the Old 
Testament," pp. 367, 377. 



SECOND CYCLE: ZOPHAR 47 

tion, between the appearance of Christ in chapter i, and the New Jerusalem in 
chapters xxi, xxii. As there, so with Job, the darkness and conflict returned, 
but never so hopeless as before. His experience here was like a brief glimpse 
of sunshine through the rifted clouds. The storm burst again upon him, but 
there was a brighter hope of the clearing skies. Maspero's translation of 
inscriptions on the pyramids shows that the Eygptians, centuries before Moses, 
believed in the resurrection. 1 

Zophar (chapter xx). {Interrupting.) 

1 have heard the reproof which putteth me to shame. 

Knowest thou not this of old time, 

Since man was placed upon earth, 
That the triumphing of the wicked is short, 
And the joy of the godless but for a moment? 

Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, 

And his head reach unto the clouds; 
Yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung: 
They which have seen him shall say, Where is he? 
He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found: 
Yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night. 

God shall cast the fierceness of his wrath upon him, 
And shall it rain upon him while he is eating. 
The Heavens shall reveal his iniquity, 
And the earth shall rise up against him. 

This is the portion of a wicked man from God, 
And the heritage appointed unto him by God. 2 

Job had rejected Zophar's counsel and refuted his teachings, and threatened 
him with judgment — him the pink and pattern of a good man. It was intoler- 
able. He therefore returns to his charge, that the triumphing of the wicked was 
short, even as Job's had been. He declares that the " terrible and ignominious 
end of all his (Job's) greatness was simply the natural and inevitable outcome 
of his heinous and notorious crimes." He had worn "a golden sorrow," but it 
was a crown of thorns. 

^ee Orr's "Christian View of God and the World," Appendix to Lecture V, on the "Old 
Testament Doctrine of Immortality." 

2 Job xx. 3-8, 23, 27, 29. 



48 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

Job (chapter xxi). 

Hear diligently my speech, 

And let this be your consolations. 
Suffer me, and I also will speak: 

And after that I have spoken, mock on. 

As for me, is my complaint to man? 
And why should I not be impatient? 

Mark me, and be astonished, 

And lay your hand upon your mouth. 
Even when I remember I am troubled, 

And horror taketh hold on my flesh. 

Wherefore do the wicked live, 

Become old, yea, wax mighty in power? 
Their seed is established with them in their sight, 

And their offspring before their eyes. 
Their houses are safe from fear, 

Neither is the rod of God upon them. 
Yet they said unto God, "Depart from us, 

For we desire not the knowledge of thy ways. 
What is the Almighty that we should serve him? 

And what profit should we have if we pray unto him?" 

(Eliphaz ?) 
Lo, their prosperity is not in their hand: 
The counsel of the wicked is far from me. 1 

(Job) 

How oft is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out? 
That they are as stubble before the wind, 
And as chaff that the storm carrieth away? 

(Zophar ?) 
Shall any teach God knowledge. 1 

1 Professor Moulton puts these three lines in the mouths of Eliphaz and Zophar, who in- 
terrupt Job. Others regard them as objections or questions spoken by Job as interpreting the 
thoughts of the friends, and then answered by Job. 



SECOND CYCLE: RESULTANT 49 

(Job) 

One dieth in his full strength, 

Being wholly at ease and quiet: 

His breasts are full of milk, 

And the marrow of his bones is moistened. 

And another dieth in bitterness of soul, 

And never tasteth of good. 

They lie down alike in the dust, 

And the worm covereth them. 

(The Friends offer to interrupt.) 

Behold, I know your thoughts, 

And the devices which ye wrongfully imagine against me. 1 

"Your consolations," (xxi. 2). "The consolations of God" of which 
Eliphaz had spoken (xv. 11). 

Job controverts the position of Zophar by showing that his principle does 
not work in actual life. The wicked are not always treated in this world accord- 
ing to their wickedness. Therefore the good also are not always treated as one 
would expect the good to be treated. You cannot tell by bis prosperity whether 
a man is good or not. 

"Be astonished" (xxi. 5) as Job himself was at the mystery of his sufferings, 
and of the prosperity of the wicked. 

The Resultant of the Second Colloquy 
The Second Colloquy marks a decided and a large advance in the action 
of the drama. The Friends advance by narrowing their position to necessary 
and vital points. They also advance by changing "the urbane tones of invita- 
tion" in the first Colloquy to the "shrill accents of invective and denunciation." 
They express their feelings more openly. And invective itself is a sign of the 
weakness of their argument. 

Job advances to a more reasonable and hopeful tone. The "consolations" 
of his friends do not irritate him so much. But most of all he gains in faith and 
in the assurance of the righteousness of God. He sees his Redeemer and 
Vindicator in the next world. Sheol is no longer a land of gloom, with shadowy 
joys, and shadowy griefs, but a real, full life, morally connected with the present 
life, in which the justice denied men here would run its full course. 

Such is the immense spoil which Job now carries off from his conflict with 
Death and Despair. Out of the very ruins created by Despair he has built up 
the Great Hope of a retributive life beyond the grave. (Condensed from 
Prof. Samuel Cox, " Commentary on Job," pp. 287-90.) 
1 Job xxi. 2-9, 14-18. 



THE THIRD CYCLE OF SPEECHES 

Eliphaz (chapter xxii). 

Can a man be profitable unto God? 

Is it any pleasure to the Almighty that thou art righteous? 

Is not thy wickedness great? 

Neither is there any end to thine iniquities. 

For thou hast taken pledges of thy brother for nought, 

And stripped the naked of their clothing. 

Thou hast not given water to the weary to drink, 

And thou hast withholden bread from the hungry. 

Thou hast sent widows away empty, 

And the arms of the fatherless have been broken. 

Therefore snares are round about thee, 

And sudden fear troubleth thee. 

Is not God in the height of heaven? 

And behold the height of the stars, how high they are! 

And thou sayest, "What doth God know? 

Can he judge through the thick darkness? 
Thick clouds are a covering to him, that he seeth not; 
And he walketh in the circuit of heaven." 

Wilt thou keep the old way 
Which wicked men have trodden? 
Who said unto God, Depart from us; 
And, What can the Almighty do for us? 
Yet he filled their houses with good things. 

Acquaint now thyself with him and be at peace: 

Thereby good shall come unto thee. 
Receive, I pray thee, the law from his mouth, 

And lay up his words in thine heart. 

5° 



THIRD CYCLE: JOB 51 

If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up; 
If thou put away unrighteousness far from thy tents. 

And the Almighty shall be thy treasure. 

And light shall shine upon thy ways. 1 



"Is it any pleasure," (xxii. 3.) They had not heard of the joy of the angels 
over one sinner that repenteth. The argument of Eliphaz is that "God is 
punishing Job. It cannot be for righteousness. Hence it must be for wicked- 
ness." (Genung, "Epic of the Inner Life," p. 252.) 

"Is not thy wickedness great?" Eliphaz breaks out in verses 5-10 in a 
string of charges of which he has no proof. He pictures Job not as he is, but 
as he ought to be according to the dogma the Friends hold, that sin is the sole 
cause of suffering. 

It is interesting to notice that the last words of Eliphaz unconsciously pre- 
dicted the final issue of this great drama. 



Job (chapters xxiii, xxiv). 

Oh that I knew where I might find him, 
That I might come even to his seat! 

I would order my cause before him, 

And fill my mouth with arguments. 

I would know the words which he would answer me, 

And understand what he would say unto me. 

Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? 

Nay, but he would give heed unto me: 

Behold I go forward, but he is not there; 

And backward, but I cannot perceive him: 

On the left hand, when he doth work, but I cannot behold him. 

He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him. 

But he knoweth the way that I take; 

When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. 2 

1 Job xxii. 2, 3, 5-7, g, io, 12-15, i7» i3» 21-23, 25. 28. 

2 Job xxiii. 3-6, 8-10. 



52 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

Bildad (chapter xxv). 

Dominion and fear are with him; 

He maketh peace in his high places. 

Is there any number of his armies? 

And upon whom doth not his light arise? 
How then can man be just before God? 
Or how can he be clean that is born of a woman? 

Behold, even the moon hath no brightness, 

And the stars are not pure in his sight: 
How much less man, that is a worm! 
And the son of man, which is a worm! L 



It will be noticed that this is the last speech of the three Friends; some 
think that this is an imperfection, and that the following chapters are an addition 
to the original book. Professor Moulton thinks that the speeches here have 
become intermingled. He gives Bildad more than is assigned to him in our 
Bibles, taken from Job's speeches, and from those speeches he also assigns a 
portion to Zophar, thus making the third cycle complete like the others. 

But the book is more poetic as it is. The Friends have said all there was 
for them to say and their argument is incomplete like the cycle of their speeches. 
And the sayings which do not seem to express Job's sentiments may be, as many 
think, quotations by Job of statements he wishes to answer. 



Job (chapter xxvi). 

He stretcheth out the north over empty space, 

And hangeth the earth upon nothing. 

He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; 

The pillars of heaven tremble 

And are astonished at his rebuke. 

He stirreth up the sea with his power. 

Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways; 

And how small a whisper do we hear of him! 

But the thunder of his power who can understand? 2 

1 Job xxv. 2-6. 

2 Job xxvi. 7, 8 ii, 12, 14. 



JOB: FIRST SOLILOQUY 53 

The Debate ends here. Then follow two Soliloquies of Job, and his "Oath 
of Clearing" chapters xxvii-xxxi, each beginning with "And Job again took 
up his parable and said." He speaks to the mixed audience, the Three Friends, 
Elihu, relatives, neighbors, and citizens. 



FIRST SOLILOQUY. (Chapters xxvii, xxviii.) 

Job first summons God as his witness — "As God liveth." Then he passes 
on to a general summing up of the facts about the wicked and their suffering. 

"The connection of the 28th chapter with the rest of the book has been 
a puzzle to some. But does it not follow naturally? Having portrayed the 
extreme of unwisdom (with which in the old philosophy wickedness was identi- 
fied), the life that has not the future nor is built therefor, it is natural that Job 
should next speak of its contrast, the true wisdom and foresight whereby to 
build human fife and character. There are many marvelous things that man 
may know or search out; but many also are unsearchable. He cannot see as 
God sees, perhaps cannot reach absolute truth. But there is a wisdom for 
him, which points to the absolute good as the needle points to the pole." (Genung, 
"Epic of the Inner Life," p. 277.) 



Job {in monologue). 

Surely there is a mine for silver, 

And a place for gold which they refine. 

Iron is taken out of the earth, 

And brass is molten out of the stone. 

As for the earth, out of it cometh bread. 

The stones thereof are the place of sapphires, 

And it hath dust of gold. 

But where shall wisdom be found? 

And where is the place of understanding? 

Man knoweth not the price thereof; 

Neither is it found in the land of the living. 

The deep saith, It is not in me: 

And the sea saith, It is not with me. 

It cannot be gotten for gold, 

Neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof. 

It cannot be valued with the gold of Ophir, 

With the precious onyx, or the sapphire. 

Yea, the price of wisdom is above rubies. 



54 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, 
Neither shall it be valued with pure gold. 
Whence then cometh wisdom? 
And where is the place of understanding? 
Destruction and Death say, 
We have heard a rumor thereof with our ears. 
God understandeth the way thereof, 
And he knoweth the place thereof. 

He established it, yea, and searched it out. 
And unto man he said, 

Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom ; 
And to depart from evil is understanding. 1 

Compare the praise of Wisdom in the early chapters of Proverbs. 

SECOND SOLILOQUY. JOB'S REVIEW OF HIS LIFE. (Chapters 

xxix, xxx.) 

"Having thus reached the culmination of his argument, Job here, in a 
retrospect, gathers up the threads of his past life and his present affliction, to 
present them as his vindication before God." (Genung, p. 283.) 

The description of his trial from his loathsome disease, with which the 
monologue closes, ends with a verse of idylic beauty and sweetness (Job xxx. 31) : 

Therefore is my harp turned to mourning, 
And my pipe unto the voice of them that weep. 

The harp and pipe (flute) were instruments of mirth. The festive music 
of his life has been broken into harsh discords. (See Cox, "Commentary on 
Job," p. 389.) 

THE OATH OF CLEARING. (Chapter xxxi.) 

Job {rising and lifting his hands). 
If I have walked with vanity, 
And my foot hath hasted to deceit; 

(Let me be weighed in an even balance, 

That God may know my integrity;) 

1 Job xxviii. 1, 2, 5, 6, 12-16, 18-20, 22, 23, 27, 28. 



JOB: THE OATH OF CLEARING 55 

If my step hath turned out of the way, 

And mine heart walked after mine eyes 

And if any spot hath cleaved to mine hands: 
Then let me sow, and let another eat; 
Yea, let the produce of my field be rooted out. 

If I have withheld the poor from their desire, 

Or have caused the eyes of the widow to fail; 

Or have eaten my morsel alone, 

And the fatherless hath not eaten thereof; 

If I have seen any perish for want of clothing, 

And if he were not warmed with the fleece of my sheep; 

If I have lifted up my hand against the fatherless, 

Because I saw my help in the gate: 
Then let my shoulder fall from the shoulder blade, 
And mine arm be broken from the bone. 

If I have made gold my hope, 

And have said to the fine gold, Thou art my confidence; 

If I rejoice because my wealth was great, 

And because mine hand had gotten much; 
This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judges : 
For I should have lied to God that is above. 

If I rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me, 

Or lifted up myself when evil found him. 

If like Adam I covered my transgressions, 

By hiding mine iniquity in my bosom; 

Because I feared the great multitude. 

If my land cry out against me, 

And the furrows thereof weep together; 

If I have eaten the fruits thereof without money, 

Or have caused the owners thereof to lose their life: 
Let thistles grow instead of wheat, 
And cockle instead of barley! 



5^ PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

Oh that I had one to hear me! 

(Lo, here is my signature, let the Almighty answer me.) 
The words of Job are ended ! x 

"Here is my signature," (xxxi. 35). Here is my sign, my mark. "Many 
an Arab chieftain could do no more at this day than affix his mark; and a hundred 
years ago it may be doubted whether more than one English squire in ten could 
have done more." (Cox, "Commentary on Job," p. 400.) 



THE OUTCOME OF THE DISCUSSION 

1. Job had come to believe that 

God is good and just in spite of evil in the world ; 

although he could not see how that truth could be reconciled with the fact of 
his sufferings. He had rebelled not against the true God, but against the 
false picture of God the three Friends had presented, "a true Medusa's head, 
the very look at which turned him to stone." 

Job was victorious over his own doubts and fears. 

Compare the "Everlasting No" of Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus," Bk. ii, 
chap. 7. 

"To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of 
Hostility. It was one huge dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on in its 
dead indifference to grind me limb from limb. ... All at once there arose a 
Thought in me, and I asked myself, What art thou afraid of? Death? Hast 
thou not a heart, canst thou not suffer whatso it be; and as a child of Freedom, 
though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet? Let it come then. I 
will meet it and defy it. . . . Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authorita- 
tively through all the recesses of my Being, of my Me; and then was it that my 
whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and with emphasis recorded 
its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in Life, may that 
same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. 
The Everlasting No had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the 
Universe is mine' (the Devil's); to which my whole Me now made answer: 
'/ am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!' ... It is from this hour 
that I date my spiritual new birth. . . . Perhaps I directly thereupon began 
to be a Man." 

Compare and contrast ^Eschylus's " Prometheus Bound," who is " the Job of 
the heathen." He, one of the gods, hoped to confer great blessings on men 
by giving to them the knowledge of fire which he stole from heaven, and carried 

1 Job xxxi. 5-8, 16, 17, 10-22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 33, 34, 38-40, 35. 40. 



THE OUTCOME OF THE DEBATE 57 

to earth " concealed in a stalk of fennel, that men might learn to forge tools 
and instruments, and so arts and wealth might arise upon the earth." Jupiter 
was angry at this, for he had little care for human happiness and designed to 
sweep away the human race. "Prometheus therefore rescued man not merely 
from a. brute life, but from death itself." It was for this good act that Prome- 
theus was chained to the peak of the Caucasus mountains, there to linger out 
the long years of eternity, while an eagle is sent to feed constantly on his living 
flesh. But Prometheus defies the lightnings of the supreme deity, Jupiter. 
He will not yield, for he is right, and has done right; and Jupiter is unjust and 
unkind, and shows it by bringing a great storm and earthquake; "the earth 
opens, and Prometheus with the rock to which he is chained sinks into the 
abyss." "In the Greek play Prometheus represents the cause of man against 
Jupiter, and openly rebels against him. . . . Now, so long as the supreme 
God is represented as wicked or unjust, such an attitude can be an object of 
sympathy ('we love him, and admire his courage and high spirit'); but to those 
who believe in the true God, a rebel against him cannot be regarded as a friend 
to man, or be an object of anything but hatred." Hence Job's friends were 
so earnest to prove that Job had done wrong instead of God. " In Prometheus 
the sovereignty of the supreme God becomes assured only when Wisdom and 
Power shall have entered into indissoluble union." Job comes to trust in the 
eternal goodness and justice of God, that somehow 

"good shall fall 
At last— far off— at last, to all"; 

although he knew that he was but 

"An infant crying in the night: 
An infant crying for the light: 
And with no language but a cry." 

(Tennyson, " In Memoriam," liv.) 

Trusting God in the dark shows more faith, cultivates faith more, than to 
merely know half the truths in the universe. Knowledge is good, but Trust 
and Love are better. 

2. Job held also to the fact that he was innocent of any conduct which could 
justly result in his suffering so much more than other men. He did not know, 
as we know, that his sufferings were sent because he was good, as in the case 
of martyrs and reformers. By his faith in God in spite of these sufferings, while 
he felt that he did not deserve them, he shows that he stood Satan's test. He 
was right in denying the accusations of his friends. For if they had been true 
he would have failed in the test. 

Compare the "Everlasting Yea" of Carlyle. 

" Foreshadows, call them rather foresplendors, of that Truth and Beginning 
of Truths, fell mysteriously over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspring to the 



58 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

Shipwrecked in Nova Zembla; ah! like the mother's voice to her little child 
that strays bewildered . . . came that Evangel — The Universe is not dead 
and demoniacal, a charnel house with spectres, but Godlike and my Father's. 
There is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness : he can do without Happiness, 
and instead thereof find Blessedness. Was it not to preach forth this same 
Higher that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken 
and suffered, bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the Godlike 
that is in Man, and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and Freedom? 
. . . Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea, wherein all 
contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works it is well with him." 
("Sartor Resartus," Bk. ii, chap. 9.) 

THE SECOND SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF SUFFERING 

That sometimes suffering is the fruit and punishment of sin ; but no 
one knows enough to judge his fellow man, and decide from the suffer- 
ing how much, if any, is due to his guilt. 

The tendency among men is to judge others. So in John ix. the 
disciples ask, "Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he should be born 
blind?" So in Luke xiii. 1-5, concerning those on whom the tower of Siloam 
fell. A good man's son goes astray, and you immediately hear that his father's 
training was not good. A man fails in business, and men look for some weak- 
ness or bad judgment. No one knows enough to judge others correctly. Com- 
pare the three Johns in each John, and the three Thomases in each Thomas, 
as shown by Dr. Holmes in his "Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," chapter iii. 
(1) the real John; known only to his Maker. (2) John's ideal John, never the 
real one, and often very unlike him. (3) Thomas's ideal John, never the real 
John, nor John's John, but often very unlike either. And a similar division for 
Thomas, of (1) the real Thomas, (2) Thomas's ideal Thomas, and (3) John's 
ideal Thomas. 

See the hymn "Think gently of the erring one," especially the lines 

"Heir of the same inheritance, 
Child of the self-same God, 
He hath but stumbled in the path 
We have in weakness trod." 

(Miss Fletcher.) 

A friend once said to the Bishop of London: "How is it that you always 
think of something pleasant to say about everybody under the sun?" The 
bishop laughed. "Well, you see," he replied, "there is so much good in 
the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it does not become any 
of us to speak ill of the rest of us." 



SECOND SOLUTION: PUNISHMENT 59 

The tendency of some to misjudge themselves. There are certain 
sensitive souls who when some misfortune comes upon them feel sure that it is 
on account of some special sin. More in former days than now a mother who 
had lost her child felt that it was taken away because she loved it too much, 
made an idol of it. See some fine remarks on this in Miss Havergal's "Kept 
for the Master's Use." 

Eleanor. "I tremble when I think how much I love him." 
Beatrice. "Do you love him as much as Christ loves us? 



Then till you reach the standard of that love 

Let neither fears nor well-meant warning voice 

Distress you with 'too much.'" 
Eleanor. "But 'tis written, 'Keep yourselves from idols' 

How shall I obey?" 
Beatrice. "Oh, not by loving less, but loving more. 

It is not that we love our precious ones 

Too much, but God too little." 

Suffering is sometimes the fruit and punishment of sin. The 
natural outcome of sin is suffering. The natural fruit of wrong-doing is pain 
and woe. This is true as a general principle and tendency. It is true 
of nations and of communities. A virtuous and temperate community will be 
more prosperous in every way than a vicious, drunken, idle, dishonest com- 
munity. Take young men as a class, and those who keep free from vices and 
intemperance, who are diligent, honest, and religious, stand the best chance 
for worldly success. And this is the promise of God, both in the Old Testa- 
ment and the New. It is the fruit also of God's laws in nature. And this is 
necessary in order to prove that God is on the side of goodness. If hell were the 
fruit of virtue, and heaven the reward of vice, it would be impossible to prove 
that God is good. 

"Howe'er we trust to mortal things, 
Each hath its pair of folded wings; 
Though long their terrors rest unspread, 
Their fatal plumes are never shed; 
At last, at last, they stretch in flight, 
And blot the day and blast the night!" 

(O. W. Holmes, "After the Fire.") 

The Bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, declares 
over and over again that punishment must and will follow sin. "Every sin 
contains within itself the seed of its own punishment — but not every seed ma- 
tures" in the moral world any more than in the physical world. 



60 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

"Natural laws are God's work, right and kind, the best for man in his 
present state of being." They cannot be improved. "Sin is wrong adjustment 
to right laws. . . . And this accounts for all the physical and material sorrow, 
sickness, misery, poverty, bitterness, violence, death in the world." (Charles 
Cuthbert Hall, D.D., "Does God Send Trouble?") 

And this is necessary in order to save the world from sin, Punishments 
are small evils compared with sin. 

"The work of the Avenger is a necessity. It is part of God's philanthropy. 
There are hells on earth into which no breath of Heaven can ever come; these 
must be swept away. There are social soils in which only unrighteousness can 
nourish; these must be broken up. 

"And that is the work of the Day of Vengeance. When is that day? It 
is now. Who is the Avenger? Law. What Law? Criminal Law, Sanitary 
Law, Social Law, Natural Law. Wherever the poor are trodden upon or 
tread upon one another; wherever the air is poison and the water foul; wherever 
want stares, and vice reigns, and rags rot — there the Avenger takes his stand. 
. . . Delay him not. He is the messenger of Christ. Despair of him not, 
distrust him not. His Day dawns slowly, but his work is sure. Though evil 
stalks the world, it is on the way to execution; though wrong reigns, it must end 
in self-combustion. The very nature of things is God's Avenger; the very 
story of civilization is the history of Christ's Throne." (Prof. Henry Drum- 
mond in "The Programme of Christianity.") 

The Old Testament abounds in statement and historic illustrations of 
the fact that disobedience to God is followed by punishment. The ravages of 
heathen nations which overwhelmed the Jews; the disasters which came from 
Nature — the plagues of Egypt, the locusts, the drought, the blight, the famine — 
are all punishments of the people's sins. So in the terrible chapters of promises 
and warning in Deuteronomy (chapters xxviii-xxx) which aroused Josiah to 
reform his people. The prophets are full of these statements till we almost 
weary of their warnings. 

The New Testament inculcates the same warnings, but with larger hope 
of forgiveness, with a fuller revelation of love, with a clearer revelation of the 
desire of God to save, and of the way of salvation, but with never a lessening 
of the fact that punishment follows sin, and the only way to escape its con- 
sequences is to turn from the sin itself. 

Even the warning of Jesus against judging others in his teaching about 
those on whom the tower of Siloam fell, does not change his attitude toward 
sin, for he adds, "but except ye repent ye shall all likewise perish" (Luke xiii. 
3), and they did at the destruction of Jerusalem, forty years later. And he 
said to the man healed at the pool of Bethesda, "Sin no more, lest a worse 
thing befall thee." (John v. 14.) "There are more than forty statements to this 
effect in the New Testament." 

It is the law of the harvest that we reap what we sow. " Be not deceived, 
God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. " 
(Gal. vi. 7.) 



SECOND SOLUTION: PUNISHMENT 6l 

"The tissue of the life to be, 

We weave with colors all our own, 
And in the field of destiny 
We reap as we have sown." 

(See Peloubet, "Loom of Life," p. 40.) 

"Sow an act and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a character, sow a 
character and reap a destiny." 

"I saw far down the coming time 
The fiery chastisement of crime, 
With noise of mingling hosts, and jar 
Of falling towers and shouts of war, 
I saw the nations rise and fall, 
Like fire-gleams on my tent's white wall." 

(Whittier, "Ezekiel.") 

La Conscience. — "Every one knows Victor Hugo's beautiful poem, 'La 
Conscience,' the story of Cain fleeing away before the Eye of God. He walks 
thirty days and thirty nights, until he reaches the shores of the ocean. ' Let us 
stop here,' says he. But as he sits down his face turns pale; he has seen ' in 
the mournful skies the Eye at the same place.' His sons, full of awe, try to 
erect barriers between him and the Eye: a tent, then a wall of iron, then a tower, 
and a city; but all is vain. 'I see the Eye still,' cries the unhappy man. At 
last they dig a tomb; the father is put into it. But 

'Though overhead they closed the awful vault, 
The Eye was in the tomb, and looked on Cain.'" 

(Rev. Reuben Saillens, D.D.) 

At a meeting of the Medical Society in Boston, President Eliot told the 
doctors that while the belief in a future hell was not so great as it once was, it 
was their business to warn young men that if they indulged in certain sins they 
would find a hell on earth. 

One of the most effective books on this subject is "Plutarch on the Delay 
of Divine Justice." 1 It is full of illustrations. He says (p. 24), "It may be 
well for us to listen to Hesiod, who maintains, not with Plato, that punishment 
is a suffering that follows wrong-doing, but that it is a twin birth with wrong- 
doing, springing from the same soil and the same root." "Guilt in the very 
act of wrong-doing receives its penalty." "Some persons are like children, 
who often, seeing in the theatres malefactors in gold-embroidered tunics and 
purple mantles, crowned and dancing, admire and applaud them as happy 
beings, until they appear on the stage goaded, and scourged, and with fire 
streaming from their gay and finely wrought apparel." 

All literature and all history are full of examples of this great warn- 
ing fact. Byron laments: 

1 Translated and edited by Prof. A. P. Peabody of Harvard. (Little, Brown & Co., $1.00.) 



62 PART II: THE GREAT DEBATE 

" No ear can hear, nor tongue can tell 
The tortures of that inward hell." 

("The Giaour," 1. 748.) 

The ghosts of those slain by Richard III haunted him with their horrors 
till he exclaims: 

"My conscience hath a thousand several tongues 
And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
And every tale condemns me for a villain." 

(Shakespeare, "King Richard III," Act v, Sc. 3.) 

One by one they appear in the vision before him, just before his last battle, 
rehearse the crimes he had committed upon them, and cry, "Despair and die. 
Let me sit heavy on thy soul to-morrow." 

"Every man's conscience is a thousand men." ("Richard III," Act v, 
Sc. 2.) 

Lady Macbeth, walking in her sleep, exclaims: "All the perfumes of Arabia 
cannot sweeten this little hand." ("Macbeth," Act v, Sc. 1.) 

Nero was haunted by the ghost of his mother whom he had put to death. 
Caligula suffered from want of sleep, being haunted by the faces of his murdered 
victims. The Furies of classic my thology " are commonly represented as bran- 
dishing each a torch in one hand and a scourge of snakes in the other." 

"I know no poem since Macbeth that so portrays the agony of an awakened 
conscience as Browning's 'Pippa Passes.'" (President Stanley Hall, "A 
Study of Fears.") See also Hawthorne's "Mosses from an Old Manse," vol. ii, 
The Bosom Serpent, where the chief character continually exclaims, "It gnaws 
me"; Hood's Poems, "Eugene Aram"; the Legend of the Troll in the preface 
to Hall Caine's "The Bondman." N. P. Willis, Poems, " Parrhasius " ; 

"Ambition only, gives 
Even of bitterness, a beaker full." 



" I sat alone with my conscience 

In a place where time had ceased, 
And we talked of my former living 

In the land where the years increased. 
The ghosts of forgotten actions 

Came floating before my sight, 
And things that I thought were dead things, 

Were alive with a terrible might; 
The vision of all my past life 

Was an awful thing to face, 
Alone with my conscience sitting 

In that silently solemn place." 

(Anon, in "Uplands of God," p. 62.) 



SECOND SOLUTION: PUNISHMENT 63 

See Joseph Cook's "Monday Lectures: Conscience," which is effective. 

"Of terrible power is the description of Judas, who, like 'staring Orestes, 
with eyes flung back upon his mother's ghost,' flees from the hellish hags of 
remorse that pursue him to his death." 

"While music flows around 
Perfumes and oils and wine and wanton hours, 
Amid the roses fierce Repentance rears 
Her snaky crest." 

(Thomson's "Seasons," Spring, 1. 994.) 

The teaching of this section is as true now as it ever was. True of individuals 
now as in Job's time. True of our nation as of the Jews. And we should 
take warning from their experience — Israel destroyed at Samaria; Judah carried 
captive with city and temple swept out of existence; the Jews who lost city 
and temple by the Romans as Christ himself foretold. Job's lesson is for all. 



PART III 

THE INTERVENTION OF ELIHU. 
POETRY. (Chapters XXXII-XXXVII.) 

THIRD SOLUTION : THAT SUFFERING IS A MEANS OF 
DISCIPLINE EVEN WHEN SENT OR PERMITTED 
ALSO FOR OTHER ENDS, AS FOR A TEST OR A 
PUNISHMENT 

RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

(To be assigned to different members of the class at the previous session, 
and for class discussion.) 

1. Review of the subject up to this time. 

2. Elihu; who he was; why introduced into the poem. 

3. Character of Elihu, as learned from his address. 

4. The purpose and aim of his address. 

5. Specially interesting particulars in it. 

6. Why is suffering of some kind necessary to a perfect character? 

7. How far is the punishment of sin intended also for a discipline? 

8. Is there any difference, as to educational value, between sufferings that 
come upon us from outward causes, and those which come upon us through our 
conflicts with evil? 

9. Illustrate from the Exile and its effects upon the Jewish nation. 

10. Find other instances in the Old Testament. 

11. Find instances in the New Testament. 

12. In what ways was Jesus made "perfect through suffering"? (Heb. iii. 
10, 18; iv. 15; v. 8.) 

13. Hymns bearing upon this subject. 

14. Illustrations from history, literature, and experience. 



BLACKBOARD 



Introduction of Elihtj : xxxii. 1-5. 

Prose. All the rest in Poetry. 

AUDIENCE : Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, neighbors, 
citizens. 

SCENE : A mound of ashes, outside the walls. 

PRELUDE : Of Elihu's speech, xxxii. 6-22. 

(To tlie Friends.) 

1ST Division : Ch. xxxiii. 

(To Job.) 
(Job makes no sign. Elihu turns to the 
Friends.) 

2ND Division : Ch. xxxiv. 

(To the three Friends.) 
(They give no sign.) 

3RD Division : Ch. xxxv. 

(To Job and the Friends.) 

4TH DrVISION : Chs. xxxvi, xxxvii. 

(General Application.) 

During this part of Elihu's speech, there are signs of the 
coming of a storm, with increasing violence ; preparing for 
the Voice from the Whirlwind, (xxxvi. 27-xxxvii. 24.) 



65 



66 PART III: ELIHU 

THE INTRODUCTION OF ELIHU. (Job xxxii. 1-5.) 
In Prose, by the author. 

Elihu was a young man who had been present during the previous discus- 
sion. His name means "He is my God." The Jews were accustomed to give 
names with a meaning, as the Puritans used to, and the Indians do to this day. 
"Among the names of the Monks who subscribed to the Act of Surrender in 
1540, are those of Charity, Faith, Godhaps, and Godluck." (George G. Brad- 
ley, D.D., " Lectures on Job," p. 285, note.) Elihu belonged to the family of Buz, 
a brother of Uz, a descendant of Nahor, the brother of Abraham (compare Gen. 
xxii. 21, 22 with Jer. xxv. 23), dwelling near Dedan in Arabia. He was an 
Aramean (Syrian) of the family or tribe of Ram = Aram = Syria. (2 Chr. 
xxiii. 5.) He was a worshipper of one God, but not an Israelite. 

Something of his personal appearance we may learn from Jer. xxv. 29, where 
the Buzites are said to have the corners of their hair polled (i. e., cut short) all 
around their temples; because, like Paul, they thought it a shame for a man to 
wear long hair. So Herodotus (iii. 8) describes the Arabs as cutting their hair 
a la Bacchus, i. e., in a ring away from their temples. 

Elihu had the natural tendencies of youth; not a "pert, braggart boy," not 
"a most conceited and arrogant young man," but with the self-confidence and 
dogmatism of one who has never been tried with great affliction. He had some- 
thing of the assurance of a sea captain who has studied navigation, but has not 
weathered mighty storms; of a cadet thoroughly versed in military science, but 
who has not yet led great armies in battle. 

Elihu " occupies the position of a young man intervening uninvited in a debate 
of old men. With the almost superstitious reverence for old age that belongs 
to early civilizations, it is natural to find that Elihu has great difficulty in nerving 
himself to this effort; and it takes him fifty-two lines to complete his apology 
for speaking at all in so venerable a presence." (See Moulton, " Modern 
Reader's Bible," xxix, xxx.) 

Many scholars think that Elihu's discourses were no part of the original 
Book of Job, but the strongest arguments for that view are really arguments 
for its being a part of the original complete poem. 

The difference in the language from that of the other speakers, being full of 
Aramaisms, is really the natural effect of his being an Aramite. 

Cheyne thinks his speech interrupts the connection between the words of 
Job and the words of Jehovah out of the storm. But one of the most beautiful 
and poetic as well as most natural portions of the whole book is that wonderful 
conception of the coming of the storm during Elihu's speech. 

It is said that Elihu adds nothing to what the Friends have said. But 
he does bring out into clear, shining vision, what the Friends only hinted at, 
the hints also being obscured by the passionate trend of their argument. The 
poem and its solution would have been incomplete without Elihu's part in it. 



A DISCIPLINE 67 

Elihu's Speeches. — While all through his four discourses, or heads of a 
single discourse, Elihu refers to mistaken utterances of Job, to things said by 
him in the surging turmoil of his agony and conflict, and which do not represent 
the outcome of this inner warfare of the soul, yet his main contribution to the 
progressive solution of the problem of suffering lies in his emphasis on the fact 
that God is disciplining his children and leading them upward to a higher, 
sweeter, nobler life. 

THE READINGS will be confined chiefly to these portions of his discourse, 
with their necessary setting. 

ELIHU (chapter xxxii). {Opening remarks to the audience, especially the three 

Friends.) 
I am young, 

And ye are very old; 
Wherefore I held back, 

And durst not shew you mine opinion. 
I said, Days should speak, 
And multitude of years should teach wisdom. 

But there is a spirit in man, 

And the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding. 
It is not the great that are wise, 
Nor the aged that understand judgment. 

Therefore I say, Hearken to me; 

I also will shew mine opinion. 

For I am full of words; 
Like new bottles it is ready to burst. 1 

FIRST DIVISION (chapter xxxiii). {Turning to Job.) 
Howbeit, Job, I pray thee, hear my speech, 

And hearken to all my words. 
Surely thou hast spoken in mine hearing, 
And I have heard the voice of thy words, saying, 

"I am clean without transgression; 

"I am innocent, neither is there iniquity in me:" 2 

"He counteth me for his enemy." 

1 Job xxxii. 6-10, 18, 19. Marg. for last line, "bottles which are ready to burst." Skin 
bottles filled with fermenting wine. Compare Matt. ix. 17. 

' Verbally true, but not the complete statement of Job's feelings. 



68 PART III: ELIHU 

God speaketh once, 

Yea twice, though man regardeth it not. 

In a dream, in a vision of the night, 
When deep sleep falleth upon men, 
In slumberings upon the bed; 

Then he openeth the ears of men, 

And sealeth their instruction, 

That he may withdraw man from his purpose, 

And hide pride from man; 

He keepeth back his soul from the pit, 

And his life from perishing by the sword. 

He is chastened also with pain upon his bed, 
So that his life abhorreth bread, 
Yea, his soul draweth near unto the pit, 
And his life to the destroyers. 

If there be with him art angel, 

An interpreter, one among a thousand, 
To shew unto man what is right for him; 
Then he is gracious unto him, and saith, 
"Deliver him from going down to the pit, 
I have found a ransom." 

His flesh shall be fresher than a child's; 

He returneth to the days of his youth: 

He prayeth unto God, 1 
And he is favourable unto him; 
So that he seeth his face with joy: 
And he restore th unto man his righteousness. 

He singeth before men, and saith, 2 

1 The Ancient Mariner first could pray when he began to love God's creatures. 

2 Songs of redemption, Rev. v. o; xv. 3; Ps. xcviii. 1. The joy of the Lord, John xvii. 3; 
Acts ii. 46; Phil. iv. 4. 



A DISCIPLINE 69 

"I have sinned, and perverted that which was right, 
And it profited me not: 

He hath redeemed my soul from going into the pit, 
And my life shall behold the light." 

Lo, all these things doth God work, 

Twice, yea thrice, with a man; 

To bring back his soul from the pit, 

That he may be enlightened with the light of the living. 

Mark well, O Job, hearken unto me 
If thou hast anything to say, answer me: 
Speak, for I desire to justify thee. 1 

(He looks to Job: Job makes no sign.) 

SECOND DIVISION (chapter xxxiv). (He turns to the three Friends.) 

Hear my words, ye wise men. 

Let us know among ourselves what is good. 

For Job has said "I am righteous, 

And God hath taken away my right." 

For he hath said, "It profiteth a man nothing 

That he should delight himself with God." 

Far be it from God, that he should do wickedness; 

And from the Almighty, that he should commit iniquity. 
Is it fit 

To say to a king, Thou art vile? 
Or to nobles, Ye are wicked? 
How much less 

To him that respecteth not the persons of princes, 
Nor regardeth the rich more than the poor. 
For hath any said unto God, 
" I have borne chastisement, 
I will not offend any more: 2 

1 Job xxxiii. 1, 8-10, 14-20, 22-32. 
3 Margin, "though I offend not." 



70 PART III: ELIHU 

That which I see not teach thou me: 

If I have done iniquity, I will do it no more? " 

Job speaketh without knowledge. 1 

(Elihu looks to the three Friends: they give no sign.) 

THIRD DIVISION (chapter xxxv). (To Job and his three Friends.) 

Look unto the heavens, and see; 

And behold the skies, which are higher than thou. 

If thou hast sinned, 

What doest thou against him? 
And if thy transgressions be multiplied, 

What doest thou unto him? 
If thou be righteous, 

What givest thou him? 

But none saith, " Where is God my Maker, 

Who giveth songs in the night ; 2 

Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, 

And maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?" 3 

Fourth Division (chapters xxxvi, xxxvii). 

(General expression of his thoughts.) 

Suffer me a little, and I will show thee. 
If they be bound in fetters, 
And be taken in the cords of affliction; 

Then he showeth them their work and their transgressions 

That they have behaved themselves proudly. 

He openeth also their ear to instruction, 

And commandeth that they return from inquity. 

If they hearken and serve him, 

They shall spend their days in prosperity, 
And their years in pleasure. 4 

1 Job xxxiv. 2, 4, 5, 9, 10, 18, 19, 31, 32, 35- 

2 Paul and Silas singing songs in the night, Acts xvi. 25; Madame Guyon's Prison Song, 
"A little bird I am." See Peloubet's " Suggestive Illustrations on the Acts," pp. 338, 339. 

3 Job xxxv. 5-7, io-ii. 

4 Margin — " pleasantness." 



A DISCIPLINE 7 1 

Yea, he would have led thee away out of distress 
Into a broad place, where there is no straitness. 1 

(The portion of Elihu's speech in which he notices the coming of the storm 
will be considered under the introduction to the Theophany.) 

The Outcome. — "If we weave these three lines of thought into a single 
argument, it may be doubted whether even now that we hold the added thought 
and experience of some thirty centuries at our service, the most searching and 
inquisitive intellect can make any real addition to this ancient solution of the 
great problem of human life and thought. For when we have said that under 
the just and kindly providence of God good comes to the good and evil to the 
evil and unthankful; that the very sufferings imposed on men, whether they be 
the natural results of their own transgression, or the strokes of a merciful and 
fruitful discipline, are intended for their instruction, correction and redemption; 
and that whatever wrongs are not remedied here shall be remedied hereafter, 
and whatever undeserved sufferings produce no present fruit of happiness shall 
bear a richer harvest in the world to come; when we have said all this, what more 
or better have even the wisest of us to say?" (Samuel Cox, " Commentary on 
Job," pp. 87-88.) 

THIRD SOLUTION 

Another reason for suffering lies in the fact that it is one of the 
Exercises in the School of Life, by which we are educated and trained 
in heavenly character and usefulness. 

The School of Life. — In the making of a man or a nation it has been 
the universal experience that pain, disappointment, conflicts with temptation, 
have been among the means God has used. They have been among God's 
schoolmasters to teach and train his people. 

In the cemetery among the beautiful hills of Williamstown stands a monu- 
ment to one of my college classmates. While wrestling, in his freshman year, 
he injured his knee. Lameness, pain, and ill-health were his guardian angels 
through study and travel, till he became a professor in the college and a saintly 
man, whose face shone almost like that of Moses when he came from the presence 
of God. On that monument are carved the words which his life had wrought 
out: Meine Trubsal war mein Gliick, "My misfortune has been my good for- 
tune," " My trouble has been my blessing." 

Almost every one who has grown in grace has learned the truth of that 
Greek proverb, old as Herodotus and ^Eschylus, Ta pathemata mathemata, The 
things we have experienced, our burdens, our difficulties, our struggles, our 
sufferings, are the things that teach us. 

Job xxxvi 2, 8-12, 16. 



72 PART III: ELIHU 

Tribulation. — Archbishop Trench in his "Study of Words" (pp. 38-40) 
illustrates this word "which occurs not seldom in Scripture and in the [Church 
of England] Liturgy. It means affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth 
our while to know how it means this, and to question ' tribulation ' a little closer. 
It is derived from the Latin 'tribulum,' which was the threshing instrument or 
harrow whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks, and 
'tribulatio' in its primary significance of the act was this separation." 

"So far as to the primitive figure of speech. But some Latin writer of the 
Christian Church appropriated the word and image for the setting forth of a 
higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for 
the separating in men of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor, from 
the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, he therefore called these sor- 
rows and trials 'tribulations' — threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, 
without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner." It is also 
said, as to this signification: "This deeper religious use of the word 'tribula- 
tion' was unknown to classical antiquity, belonging exclusively to the Christian 
writers." 

Trench quotes, in illustration of this truth, the following lines by " George 
Wither, a prolific versifier, and occasionally a poet, of the seventeenth century." 

" Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, 
Until the chaff be purged from the wheat, 
Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear, 
The richness of the flour will scarce appear. 
So, till men's persons great afflictions touch, 
If worth be found, their worth is not so much, 
Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet 
That value which in threshing they may get. 
For till the bruising flails of God's corrections 
Have threshed out of us our vain affections; 
Till those corrections which do misbecome us 
Are by thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us; 
Until from us the straw of worldly treasures, 
Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures, 
Yea, till his flail upon us he doth lay, 
To thresh the husk of this our flesh away; 
And leave the soul uncovered; nay, yet more, 
Till God shall make our very spirit poor, 
We shall not up to highest wealth aspire; 
But then we shall; and that is my desire." 

The emphasis is not on the threshing, but on the grain; not on the chastise- 
ment, but on the character that results. 

Discipline means teaching, education, training, causing the disciple- 
learner, one who goes to school — to learn the qualities and character which make 
heaven. ' 

Chastisement is derived from "chasten," " to make chaste," "and 'chaste' 



A DISCIPLINE 73 

is the beautiful, snowy Latin 'castus,' spotless, pure, holy," whiter than 
snow. 

God disciplines far more by good than by evil, by the blessings of life than 
by its sorrows, by the long prosperous years of Job before and after his tribula- 
tions than by his sufferings. But he used and uses both. 

While persecution and trouble develop certain virtues, there are others which 
are developed better in times of peace. Disciples need both kinds of training. 
Night is necessary as well as day, but all darkness is even more disastrous than 
ah daytime. 

Jeremy Taylor describes some lamps in the tomb of Terentia as burning 
brightly in the darkness of the tomb, but going out when brought forth into the 
light, as a type of Christians whose piety burns brightly in the darkness of 
persecution and trouble, but goes out in the light of prosperity. Mr. Rogers, 
commenting on this, says that it by no means follows that all darkness is good 
for the Christian, for " then the bright lamps of which Taylor speaks would 
irradiate only a tomb." 

The Quarry for the Temple. — This world is a quarry where the living 
stones of God's beautiful temple in the heavens, the completed and perfected 
church, are being shaped and polished for their places in the building. Few 
places are more rough, more lacking in every element of beauty, than a stone 
quarry. I began my ministry among the quarries of Cape Ann, which have 
since been multiplying over its granite surface. Were I to take the owners of 
some of the newer quarries and walk with them over the familiar places, I could 
say to them: "I remember when I used to walk here among stately trees, or sit 
under the shadow of a great rock and feast on the surrounding beauties; but 
now you have blasted the rocks, you have cut down the trees, you have littered 
the fields with broken fragments. What does it all mean?" Then they could 
take me to some noble buildings in various cities and say: "Do you see those 
stately buildings, beautiful cornices, graceful arches, lofty columns? Well, 
there is the meaning of the quarry." So the heavenly temple is the solution of 
the mysteries of Providence in this world. The cares, burdens, sorrows, joys, 
work of this life are fitting us for our place in that temple where no sound of 
the tools shall be heard while it is in building. 

There is a story, told in the " Choir Boy of York Cathedral," of a man 
named Theodoras who went to Athens and fell asleep in the temple of Minerva. 
He dreamed that he went to another place where there was a Palace of Destiny. 
This was in the form of a pyramid. Each story represented a world. Theo- 
doras saw a friend of his, called Sextus, in each one of these stories, or worlds. 
In one world he was prosperous and good; in another he was contented with a 
very humble lot; in still another he was a king, and a good king, too. Finally, 
Theodoras entered the highest apartment of all, and was so delighted that he 
nearly fainted for joy. But here he saw Sextus, a wicked man and rained for- 
ever. "This," said his guide, "is the very best world of all"; but Theodoras 



74 PART III: ELIHU 

was puzzled to know how it could be the best and yet make his friend Sextus 
worse off in it than in any of the others. "It is the best possible world," said 
his guide, "and Sextus might have made the best out of it." "The best pos- 
sible world" is best only for those who have learned to love and obey God per- 
fectly. Adam was driven from Paradise because it was not the best place for 
him. A world of discipline is the best then. But when men are fully re- 
deemed from sin then they can also dwell in Paradise Regained, the glorious 
city of God. 

"In the Arabian Nights' tales there is a story of a remarkable ointment 
which, if rubbed on the eye, makes one see all the riches in the world; the gold 
hidden in the mines; the diamonds treasured in secret places. Macaulay, the 
great English writer, said that education is like that ointment, opening the eyes 
to see so much more." (President Seth Low, in an address on Education.) 

This is especially true of the moral education which comes through the 
divine training and discipline. 

Charles Mackay has a poem in which Milton, blind to the blue sky, "sees 
the bowers of Paradise"; and Beethoven, "Music's Great High Priest," deaf 
to all sound, yet in his soul hears "jubilant hymns and lays of love." 

"To blind old Milton's rayless orbs 
A light divine is given, 
And deaf Beethoven hears the hymns 
And harmonies of heaven." 

" And when a damp 
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand 
The Thing became a trumpet, whence he blew 
Soul-animating strains — alas, too few." 

(Wordsworth, " Scorn not the Sonnet.") 

"All God's angels come to us disguised; 
Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, 
One after other lift their frowning masks, 
And we behold the seraph's face beneath 
All radiant with the glory and the calm 
Of having looked upon the front of God." 

(J. R. Lowell, " On the Death of a Friend's Child.") 

See Ugo Bassi's "Sermon in the Hospital"; Bushnell's "Moral Uses of 
Dark Things"; Peloubet's " Loom of Life." 

Note that often small trials constantly repeated are often more difficult to 
bear than some great trouble. It is less easy to endure the buzz and bite of a 



A DISCIPLINE 75 

cloud of mosquito troubles than the lion roar of a great affliction. Hence the 
petty annoyances, the frettings of temper, the daily and hourly trials are often 
the means of our severest and most effective discipline. 
Tennyson says (" In Memoriam," i): 

"I held it truth, with him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones, 
That men may rise on stepping-stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things." 

But it is far better to rise on stepping-stones of their living selves to higher 
things. If, as Longfellow says (in his " Ladder of St. Augustine "), 

" Of our vices we can frame 
A ladder, if we will but tread 
Beneath our feet each deed of shame," 

how much more can we frame a ladder of all deeds faithfully done: 

"Arise and fly 
The reeling faun, the sensual feast; 
Move upward, working out the beast, 
And let the ape and tiger die." 

(Tennyson, " In Memoriam," cxviii.) 

Conflicts, hard duties, self-sacrifices, are the means of making men. The 
father who shelters his boy from these is doing his best to ruin him. 

Governor Seymour, of New York, once said that if God should give him the 
opportunity to live his life over again, and to choose which of the things in the 
life he had lived he would retain and which he would leave out, whatever other 
changes he might make, he would not dare to leave out a single trial or hard 
duty. 

We dream of Edens without care or annoyance or pain; we join in the wish 
of the poet : 

" O could we do with this world of ours 
As thou dost with thy garden bowers, 
Reject the weeds and keep the flowers, 
What a heaven on earth we'd make it! " 

(Thomas Moore, " Lalla Rookh.") 

But God always casts us out of these Eden dreams. For the fallen Adam 
and Eve Eden was the worst place in the world. God drove them out that 
they might attain to Paradise Regained. 



76 PART III: ELIHU 

The meaning of burdens, cares, sorrows, is nobler and purer lives, sweeter 
harps, brighter crowns, higher thrones. 

Compare Johnson's " Rasselas " in the Happy Valley; Professor James's 
experience at Chautauqua, in his "Talks to Teachers on Psychology," pp. 
268-75. 

Compare the Seven Promises to him that overcome th, in Revelation ii., iii. 
And Christ's example in the Wilderness of temptation, and in Gethsemane, as 
interpreted in Hebrews ii. 16-18; iii. 10, 18; iv. 15; v. 8; and the power of sym- 
pathy and help he gained on those battlefields, or perhaps rather we gain from 
knowing his experience. 

In the same way we gain a similar power in our degree of comforting and 
helping others, one of the richest blessings ever conferred on man. 

The Exile of the Jews teaches us a lesson. For their sins they were sent into 
long and terrible exile, homes and nation destroyed, organized worship in the 
temple no longer possible, Sabbath almost impossible under heathen masters. 
But there they learned the lesson of the evil of disobedience and unrighteous- 
ness. They came to hunger and thirst after God's worship and Word, and 
thus became prepared to return and build up the nation anew. The New 
Jerusalem will be the fulfilment of their vision and hope. 

"All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds, 

That have their root in thoughts of ill; 
Whatever hinders or impedes 
The action of the nobler will — 

" All these must first be trampled down 
Beneath our feet, if we would gain 
In the bright fields of fair renown 
The right of eminent domain." 

(Longfellow, " Ladder of St. Augustine.") 

All the fruits of the Spirit are ripened by conflict with the works of the flesh 
and victory over them. 

We learn joy by conquering the false joys of the world, by triumph over 
sorrow. 

We learn love by victory over the enemies that hate us. 

We learn peace by clinging to Christ in the storm. 

We learn faithfulness by duties done when to do them means hardship 
and loss. 

We learn kindness by doing good to them that hate us and despitefully use 
us. 

We learn temperance by victory over our strong appetites and passions. 

We learn meekness and patience in an evil world, full of wrongs. 



A DISCIPLINE 77 

"Build thee more stately mansions, 
Oh, my soul, 
As the swift seasons roll! 
Leave thy low- vaulted past! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, 

Till thou at length art free, 
Leaving thine outworn shell by life's unresting sea." 

(O. W. Holmes, " The Chambered Nautilus.") 

And thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led 
thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove 
thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his 

or no. (Deut. viii. 2.) 



PART IV 

THE VOICE OF GOD FROM THE WHIRL- 
WIND. (Chapters xxxviii. i-xlii. 6.) 

FOURTH SOLUTION: THERE ARE SOME TROUBLES 
WHICH ARE AN INSOLUBLE MYSTERY, BUT GOD 
HAS REVEALED HIMSELF AS SO GOOD, SO WISE, 
SO POWERFUL, SUCH A LOVING FATHER, THAT 
WE CAN REST OUR SOULS ON HIM IN PERFECT 
PEACE AND FAITH AND LOVE 

RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

(To be assigned to various members of the class at the previous session, 
and for general discussion.) 

i. The poetic beauty and effectiveness of the approach of the storm. 

2. What kinds of suffering and evil are an inscrutable mystery? 

3. The appropriateness of God's speaking from a whirlwind. John iii. 
5-8; Acts ii. 1-4. 

4. The use of nature by Christ in his teachings. What things in nature 
he uses, and their teachings. 

5. The value of studying nature in this way in our religious education. 

6. Why is nature a symbol and illustration of spiritual truths? 

7. What do we learn concerning God's wisdom from nature? 

8. What do we learn concerning his power? 

9. What concerning his goodness? 

10. How does nature lead us to faith in God, as a help and comfort in trouble? 

11. Why do we need the revelation of Jesus Christ in order to understand 
God in his fulness, and in order to fully trust him? 

12. Effect of this vision of God upon Job. 

13. Hymns concerning nature as revealing God. 

14. Illustrations from literature and experience. 

79 



80 THE THEOPHANY 

PREPARATIONS FOR THE VOICE OF GOD 

(Beginning at xxxvi. 26, at which point signs of an approaching storm 
appear in the sky, which gradually increase in intensity during the remainder 
of Elihu's speech, which seems to have been cut short by the overwhelming force 
of the storm.) 

Scene. — Job, his Friends, Elihu, and bystanders, are all upon or around 
the great ash mound outside of the city, exposed to the full force of the storm. 
Elihu was probably speaking from the top of the mound whence he could see the 
skies in every direction. 

READINGS. 1 

Elihu (chapters xxxvi. 26-xxxvii. 24). 

Behold, God is great, and we know him not; 
The number of his years is unsearchable. 

(The sun drawing water.) 

For he draweth up the drops of water, 
Which distil in rain from his vapor: 

(A shower in the distance.) 

Which the skies pour down 

And drop upon man abundantly. 

(Distant thunder.) 

Yea, can any understand the spreadings of the clouds, 

The thunderings of his pavilion? 
Behold, he spreadeth his light around him; 
And he covereth the bottom of the sea. 

For by these he judgeth the peoples; 

He giveth meat in abundance. 

(Lightning bolt from clouds to earth.) 

He covereth his hands with the lightning; 

And giveth it a charge that it strike the mark. 
The noise thereof telleth concerning him, 

The cattle also concerning the storm that cometh up. 

(A loud peal of thunder, close at hand.) 

1 Moulton and Cary best set forth the coming of the storm, and I follow their general lines 
of expressing its progress. 



THE COMING OF THE STORM 8l 

At this also my heart trembleth, 
And is moved out of its place. 
Hearken ye unto the noise of his voice, 
And the sound that goeth out of his mouth. 

{Thunder and lightning all around the horizon.) 

He sendeth it forth under the whole heaven, 
And his lightning unto the ends of the earth. 

After it a voice roareth; 

He thundereth with the voice of his majesty: 
And he stayeth them not when his voice is heard. 

( The storm increases.) 

God thundereth marvellously with his voice; 

Great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. 

{Hail and snow.) 

For he saith to the snow, Fall thou on the earth; 
Likewise to the shower of rain, 
And to the showers of his mighty rain. 

{The storm increases in violence.) 

Then the beasts go into coverts, 
And remain in their dens. 

{The warm storm from the south meets the 
cold one from the north.) 

Out of the chamber of the south cometh the storm: 

And cold out of the north. 
By the breath of God ice is given: 

And the breadth of the waters is straitened. 1 
Yea, he ladeth the thick cloud with moisture; 
He spreadeth abroad the cloud of his lightning: 

{The storm has become a whirlwind; the 
whole scene is wrapped in thick dark- 
ness, broken by flashes oj lightning.) 

And it is turned round about by his guidance, 
That they may do whatsoever he commandeth them 

1 Margin, "congealed." 



82 THE THEOPHANY 

Upon the face of the habitable world: 

Whether it be for correction, or for his land, 

Or for mercy, that he cause it to come. 

Hearken unto this, O Job: 

Stand still, and consider the wondrous works of God. 

Dost thou know how God layeth his charge upon them, 

And causeth the lightning of his cloud to shine? 
Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds, 1 
The wondrous works of him which is perfect in knowledge? 
{A change to sultry heat which precedes the 
coming of the cyclone.) 

How thy garments are warm 

When the earth is still by reason of the south wind. 

Canst thou with him spread out the sky, 

Which is strong as a molten mirror? 
Teach us what we shall say unto him; 

For we cannot order our speech by reason of darkness. 2 

{The storm cloud has now plunged them in 
its thickest darkness, filling Elihu with 
terror.) 

Shall it be told him that I would speak? 

Or should a man wish that he were swallowed up? 3 

{Supernatural brightness too vivid to gaze 
upon mingles strangely with the dark- 
ness of the storm.) 

And now men see not the light which is bright in the skies; 
But the wind passeth and cleanseth them. 4 
Out of the north cometh golden splendor: 

{The Shekinah, the manifestation of Jeho- 
vah's visible presence, shining upon the 
dark background of the storm cloud.) 

1 See Ruskin, " Modern Painters," vol. v, "The cloud-chariots." 

2 Elihu's succeeding words, accordingly, are confused and incoherent, indicating a vague 
terror of impending destruction. (Genung, p. 325.) 

3 Margin, "If a man speak surely he shall be swallowed up." 

4 Margin, "And now men cannot look on the light when it is bright in the skies, when the 
wind hath passed, and cleansed them." 



THE COMING OF THE STORM 83 

God hath upon him terrible majesty. 
Touching the Almighty, we cannot find him out; he is excellent 
in power; 
And in judgment and plenteous justice he will not afflict. 
Men do therefore fear him: 
He regardeth not any that are wise of heart. 

(The roar 0} the whirlwind gives place to 
a Voice.) 



No portion of the poem is more poetic and dramatic in form than this com- 
mingling with exquisite tact and skill Elihu's closing argument with the descrip- 
tion of the approaching storm. 

With the 22d verse "Elihu begins to retract his pretensions, and in a kind 
of wheedling terror to bring God's mercies to mind, as if in a confused attempt 
thereby to turn away the wrath that seems so imminent. 

" This is the last of Elihu. He is self-judged. Though he has said many 
noble things, and represented the highest and the truest that the friends could 
bring forth from the treasures of their Wisdom, yet, because of its unspiritual 
and essentially selfish basis in their character, it does not enable them to stand 
before the searching light of God's immediate presence. It is only aspiring love 
and purity of heart that can endure His face." (Genung, " Epic of the Inner 
Life," p. 326.) 

Compare Lord Marmion's experience in Walter Scott's poem, when a word, 
a look from the reverend palmer, "full upon his conscience struck." 

" Thus oft it haps that, when within 
They shrink at sense of secret sin, 

A feather daunts the brave, 
A fool's wild speech confounds the wise, 
And proudest princes veil their eyes 

Before their meanest slave." 

The Golden Splendor. — The "north" from which came the golden 
splendor " must not be taken of the north wind cleansing the skies, but of the 
north as in prophetic imagination the quarter specially associated with the 
Divine abode, or the direction from which the God of Judgment makes his 
appearance. This is perfectly clear from Isaiah, chapter xiv. 13: 

'Sit upon the mount 0} congregation, in the uttermost parts 0} the north: I 
will ascend above the heights 0} the clouds; I will be like the Most High.' 

1 (Compare Ezekiel, chapter i. 4; Jeremiah, vi. 1 ; i. 13-14, etc.) It is a regular 
feature of the theophanies of Scripture to have a supernatural brightness as a 
stage beyond the natural tempest. Thus in Ezekiel's vision (i. 4) : 



84 THE THEOPHANY 

1 Behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire flash- 
ing continually, and a brightness round about it,' etc." (Moulton, " Modern 
Reader's Bible," p. 175.) 

Note that the manifestation of God is through the two symbols which best 
express the nature of God — Light and Wind. 

The Shekinah, the visible expression of God's presence among the children 
of Israel, was seen in the flaming bush; in the pillar of cloud and fire (Ex. xiii. 
21, 22); on Mt. Sinai at the giving of the law, like "a devouring fire in the 
eyes of the children of Israel" (Ex. xxiv. 10-17); filling the Tabernacle (Ex. 
xl. 34, 35); and the Temple at its dedication (1 Kin. xiii. 10, n; 2 Chron. vii. 

1-3)- ' 

Physical science declares that there is "an intangible, invisible ether, which 
cannot be touched or tasted or contained or measured or weighed, but yet is 
everywhere, and in one form or another does all the physical work of the uni- 
verse." Light is one kind of motion in this ether. Yet "it is invisible, incon- 
ceivable, unknown to us, unless matter to make it visible is in its path." (See 
Lewis Wright, " Light," chap, xviii.) 

Light is mysterious in its nature, ineffably bright and glorious, everywhere 
present, swift-winged, undefiled, and undefilable. Light is the source of life, 
of beauty, of manifested reality, of warmth, comfort, and joy, of health, and of 
power. It destroys all darkness; it unites in itself purity and clearness. With- 
out it the world would be but a mass of coldness and death. 

The Whirlwind. — Nothing is more suitable than that the voice of God 
should come from the whirlwind. For (1) Air, wind, is one of the chosen symbols 
of God working through his Holy Spirit, as at Pentecost. The same Greek 
word signifies both spirit and wind. (See John iii. 5-8; Acts ii. 1-4, etc.) 

It is invisible, as are the great natural forces of the earth. 

It is known by its works, by what it does. 

It is mysterious, no one knows whence it comes or whither it goes. No 
Weather Bureau knows why or whence. It can only observe and report its 
movements. 

It is very powerful. The air is so powerful that even free dynamite smiting 
against it on one side crushes the rocks on the other. 

Yet it is very gentle and delicate, breathing around the rose, and gently 
touching the little child. 

It comes pure from heaven. 

The air is all-pervasive. It penetrates the hardest rock. 

It is the breath of life. No one can live without it. 

(2) The storm was a symbol of the afflictions of Job. All its manifestations 
as described above, coming so mysteriously, expressed the storm that had swept 
over his soul. 

I know of nothing which sets out the scene so vividly as the experience of 
Elijah on Horeb. 



THE VOICE OF GOD 85 

"On Horeb's rock the prophet stood, 
The Lord before him passed; 
A hurricane in angry mood 

Swept by him strong and fast. 

The forests fell before its force 
The rocks were shivered in its course. 



'Twas but the whirlwind of his breath 
Announcing danger, wreck and death. 

'Twas but the rolling of his car 
The trampling of his steeds afar. 

At last a voice all still and small 

Rose sweetly on the ear, 
Yet rose so shrill and clear that all 

In heaven and earth might hear. 

It spoke of peace, it spoke of love, 
It spoke as angels speak above, 
And God himself was here; 
For oh, it was a Father's voice 
That made the trembling world rejoice." 

(Henry F. Lyte.) 



THE VOICE FROM THE WHIRLWIND. (Job xxxviii. 2-xl. 6.) 

The Lord. 

Who is this that darkeneth counsel 

By words without knowledge? 

Gird up now thy loins like a man; 

For I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. 



Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? 

— Decla-e, if thou hast understanding — 

Who determined the measures thereof, if thou knowest? 

Or who stretched the line upon it? 

Whereupon were the foundations thereof fastened? 

Or who laid the corner stone thereof; 



86 THE THEOPHANY 

When the morning stars sang together, 
And all the sons of God shouted for joy? 

Or who shut up the sea with doors, 

And prescribed for it my decree, 

And set bars and doors, 

And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; 

And here shall thy proud waves be stayed? 

Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? 

Or hast thou walked in the recesses of the deep? 

Have the gates of death been revealed unto thee? 
Hast thou entered the treasuries of the snow, 
Or hast thou seen the treasuries of the hail, 
Canst thou bind the cluster of the Pleiades, 
Or loose the bands of Orion? 

Canst thou lead forth the Mazzaroth 1 in their season? 
Or canst thou guide the Bear with her train? 
Canst thou send forth lightnings, that they may go, 
And say unto thee, Here we are? 

Shall he that cavilleth contend with the Almighty? 
He that argueth with God, let him answer it. 2 

{A lull in the storm.) 

Job. 

Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer thee? 

I lay mine hand upon my mouth. 

Once have I spoken, and I will not answer; 

Yea twice, but I will proceed no further. 3 

{The whirlwind awakens again.) 

The Lord (chapters xl. 7-xli. 34). {Speaking out of the whirlwind. We 
must consider that the thunderstorm is still raging.) 

Gird up thy loins now like a man: 

I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. 

1 Margin, "the signs of the Zodiac." 

2 Job xxxviii. 2-8, 10, n, 16, 17, 22, 31, 32, 35; xl. 2 

3 Jobxl. 4, 5. 



Job. 



THE VOICE OF GOD 87 

Wilt thou even disannul my judgment? 

Wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be justified? , 

Or hast thou an arm like God? 

And canst thou thunder with a voice like him? 
Deck thyself now with excellency and dignity; 

And array thyself with honor and majesty. 
Pour forth the overflowings of thine anger: 

And look upon every one that is proud, and abase him. 

And tread down the wicked where they stand. 
Hide them in the dust together; 

Bind their faces in the hidden place. 
Then will I also confess of thee 
That thine own right hand can save thee. 

Behold now behemoth, 1 which I made with thee; 

Shall any take him when he is on the watch, 

Or pierce through his nose with a snare? 

Canst thou draw out leviathan 2 with a fish-hook? 

Or press down his tongue with a cord? 

Lay thine hand upon him; 

Remember the battle, 

And do so no more. 

(The storm begins to abate?) 

I know that thou canst do all things, 

And that no purpose of thine can be restrained. 



The Lord. 3 

Who is this that hideth counsel without knowledge? 

(The Voice retreating.) 

Job. 

Therefore have I uttered that which I understood not, 
Things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. 

Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak. 

(More distant.) 

1 The hippopotamus. 

2 The crocodile. 

3 These divisions are made by Moulton. This saying is a quotation of God's word con- 
cerning Elihu (xxxviii. 2.) Either the Lord repeats it or Job quotes it to apply it. 



88 THE THEOPHANY 

The Lord. 1 

I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. 



Job. 

I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear; 
But now mine eye seeth thee : 
Wherefore I abhor myself, 
And repent in dust and ashes. 2 

(The storm ceases.) 

"The treasuries of the snow," (xxxviii. 22.) Many are the uses of snow 
i-n the economy of nature; the treasure-house of water for spring, the blanket 
that keeps plant life from freezing to death. For its power recall the armies 
of Napoleon on their retreat from Moscow. See Natural Philosophies; " Snow- 
flakes "; McCook's " The Gospel in Nature," Snow Crystals, Purity of Snow, 
and several other chapters on snow. 

"Contend with the Almighty," (xl. 2.) "Because there is sin and misery 
in the world, because hearts ache and bodies die, shall we turn upon this sub- 
limely exhaustless Being, and demand explanation? Is it not something to 
know how He delights in making, in endless creating, and that One who thus 
delights cannot be cruel? The explanation will come." (Robert Buchanan.) 

On the meaning and power of nature, especially the sea, the clouds and sky, 
and the mountains, see Ruskin's " Modern Painters," vol. v, which gave me a 
new revelation of nature. 

Dr. Amory H. Bradford's " Messages of the Masters," chapters on Giron's 
The Mountains, the grandeur and glory of the mountains; on Renouf's The 
Pilot, the message and ministry of the sea; and on Turner's The Old Temeraire, 
the mystery and ministry of the sea. 

Hugh MacMillan's " Bible Teachings in Nature "; Coleridge's " Hymn to 
Mont Blanc"; H. C. McCook's "The Gospel in Nature"; Dr. E. F. Burr's 
"Ecce Ccelum"; Agnes Giberne's "The Stars." The little book "The 
Stars and the Earth " is very remarkable. Study the allusions to nature in 
the Psalms, especially Psalms xix and cvii, and in Isaiah and the other prophets. 

1 This too is a quotation of God's words to Job (xxxviii. 3) or a repetition by the Lord. 

2 Job xl. 7-15, 24; xli. 1, 8; xlii. 2-6. 



THE TRAINING OF FAITH 89 



THE FOURTH SOLUTION 

In the first place, recall the fact that there are sorrows and pains which 
are an insoluble mystery. In every life there are losses and disappointments 
and sickness and death for which we can see no reason. 

"There is no flock however watched and tended 
But one dead lamb is there, 
There is no fireside howsoe'er defended 
But has one vacant chair. 

"The air is full of farewells to the dying, 
And mournings for the dead; 
The heart of Rachel for her children crying 
Will not be comforted." 

(Longfellow, " Resignation.") 

Who can tell why we are cut off in the prime of usefulness ? 

Who knows why he is sick and weak when he wants so much to do good ? 

Who can understand why he is deprived of so many things he longs for — 
music, art, travel, books? 

Who can understand why to him disaster follows disaster, loss follows loss, 
disappointment disappointment, from the sins of others, and not his own? 

Who can understand steamboat disasters, railroad wrecks, the ravages of 
war, and all the cruelties and oppressions and persecutions and wrongs of every 
kind which give a lurid light to all history, so that it is hard to believe in the 
perfect goodness of God? 

There are so many things of which Christ seems to say to us as he did to 
Peter: "What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt understand here- 
after" (John xiii. 7.) 

In the second place, how does the Voice from the Whirlwind help us? 

For many years this Voice was a puzzle and a disappointment to me. When 
Job wanted comfort and light on his bitter sorrow, some rays from God "with 
healing in its wings," lo, He speaks to us of creating the world, of seas, and 
stars, of far away Orion and Pleiades, of snow and clouds and lightning, of 
leviathan and behemoth, of the wild ass and ostrich and horse and lion, of moun- 
tains and trees. What have these to do for a man whose hopes are blasted 
and whose body is racked with pain? 

But, as a matter of fact, there was no answer possible then, better than the 
one God gave, by showing his infinite power, knowledge, wisdom and goodness; 
and saying to Man, Look at these works of mine, which you can see and touch; 
see my manifold wisdom, manifested in a thousand ways; see how good I am 
in ministering to the happiness of all living things; see how strong I am to guide 
the stars in their courses; see how vast I am, that none can escape my ken and 



9° PART IV: SOLUTION 

care; see my knowledge that rules all nature's complicated machinery — if these 
things are so in that which you can understand, can you not trust me in those 
things which you cannot understand? Can you not say: 

"I know not where his islands lift 
Their fronded palms in air, 
I only know I cannot drift 
Beyond his love and care." 

(Whittier, " The Eternal Goodness.") 

The first time I stood at the base of the Eiffel Tower, and gazed at the ele- 
vator running up almost a thousand feet, lifted by a wire rope moved by unseen 
machinery, I hesitated at trusting myself to the seemingly perilous journey. But 
when I learned that already thirteen millions of people had been carried without 
a single accident, I said to myself, that elevator has been abundantly proved and 
tested, I will trust myself to it. 

So God bids us trust him in the unseen because he has been proved trust- 
worthy in the seen. 

Will he care for the stars and not for you? 

"The voice that rolls the stars along 
Speaks all the promises." 

Will he be wise in all physical things with a wisdom that grows greater to 
us the more we study his works, and not be wise in the things that pertain to 
immortal souls? 

Will he uphold with his wisdom and power all inanimate things and not 
fold his children in his everlasting arms ? 

Will he take thought for birds and flowers, the grass of the field which to-day 
is and to-morrow is cast into the oven, and not care for you, oh ye of little faith? 
(See Matt. vi. 30.) 

It is thus he comforts and strengthens our faith in the prayer his Son has 
taught us to pray, by sustaining the petitions with the assurance " For thine is 
the kingdom and the power and the glory forever." 

"And so in the wearisome journey 
Over life's troubled sea, 
I know not the way I am going, 
But Jesus shall pilot me." 

(Anon. Quoted in Foster's 
" Cyclopedia of Poetical Illustrations," No. 3619.) 

In the third place, all this from nature is imperfect without Jesus Christ, 
the messenger of God's love to us, the proof that he is a loving Father of all his 
children. 



THE TRAINING OF FAITH 91 

Nature alone cannot fully assure us. See the conflict finely wrought out 
in Tennyson's ' ' In Memoriam ' ' (liv-lvii.) 

Nature does not seem always good. Her laws seem to work inexorably, 
careless of what may be the result to man, so that John Stuart Mill once wrote : 
"Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one 
another are Nature's every day performances." 

So Tennyson (in his " In Memoriam," lvi) speaks of a man 

"Who trusted God was love indeed 
And love Creation's final law — 
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw 
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed." 

So Professor Huxley (in his "Lay Sermons," p. 31) uses as an illustration 
Retzsch's famous picture, a copy of which hangs in my study, of the young man 
playing chess with Satan, for his soul, the pieces on Satan's side being all the 
evil passions — anger, pride, sloth, sinful pleasures, selfishness, unbelief; while 
on the young man's side the pieces are religion, love, peace, faith, courage, and 
the pawns are prayers. "Substitute for the mocking fiend in the picture a 
calm, strong angel who is playing for love, as we say, and would rather lose than 
win, and I should accept it as an image of human life. . . . The chess- 
board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of 
the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is 
hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But 
also we know to our cost that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest 
allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well the highest stakes are 
paid, with the sort of overflowing generosity with which the strong shows delight 
in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated without haste and without 
remorse." 

It is in view of Nature as we thus see it that Tennyson again sings: 

"I falter where I firmly trod, 

And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the world's great altar-stairs 
That slope through darkness up to God, 

"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, 
And gather dust and chaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all, 
And faintly trust the larger hope." 

("In Memoriam," lv.) 
So Job found, 

"The Deep saith, It is not in me; 
And the Sea saith, It is not with me; 



92 PART IV: SOLUTION 

Destruction and Death say, 

We have heard a rumor thereof with our ears." 

(Job xxviii. 14, 22.) 

"The Owlet Atheism 
Sailing on obscene wings athwart the noon, 
Drops his blue-fringed lids, and holds them close, 
And hooting at the glorious Sun in heaven, 
Cries out, 'Where is it?'" 

(Coleridge, "Fear in Solitude.") 

But all this is changed by the coming of Jesus Christ, who is the absolute 
proof of the love of God. " If God is for us, who is against us ? " 

" He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, 
how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? Who shall 
separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or anguish, or 
persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all 
these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. 
For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor prin- 
cipalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor 
height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us 
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 
viii. 31, 32, 35, 37-39.) 

It is comforting to see in actual history how wicked wars have been used 
by God to help forward the progress of man; as the wars which brought Judah 
into exile, those of Alexander the Great, of Rome, of the French Revolution, of 
our Revolution and Civil War. The greatest mystery is to see how to the 
individual sufferers in these conflicts good could come. 

The one thing we need to know is not the meaning of all our trials and the 
reason for all God does to us, but that God is our Father, that his power is 
limitless, his wisdom perfect, and his love is as great as his power. Our fathers 
may have dwelt too much in proportion on the greatness and sovereignty of God; 
but we are to make the proportion right, not by lessening our idea of his power, 
but by enlarging our idea of his love. Here we rest as a child in its mother's 
arms. Here we come close to God in love. It is better not to know all the rea- 
sons in order that we may trust and love the more. 

In the fourth place, when once we have seen and felt that God is a 
Father, a personal Friend; not Teufeldrockh's "Absentee God, sitting at the 
outside of the Universe, and seeing it go," but rather an ever-present God, ordain- 
ing his laws but always in them and using them; then Nature is an education, 
an inspiration, an unveiling of God. 

Longfellow wrote of Agassiz, the great investigator of Nature: 
"Here is a story book 
Thy Father hath written for thee. 



THE TRAINING OF FAITH 93 

Come wander with me, she said, 
Into regions yet untrod; 
And read what is still unread 
In the manuscripts of God." 

Nature, without revelation, is like a great cathedral with divinely pictured 
windows seen from without. Nature, with revelation, is like the same cathedral 
seen from within. 

An astronomer was converted, and was asked what he would now do with 
his studies. In reply he said, " I am going to heaven and will take the stars on 
the way." "We look through Nature up to Nature's God." 

One of the most interesting articles on this general subject is Edward Everett 
Hale's story in which he compares Homer and David, by representing each one 
as singing selections from his own works: Homer from the "Iliad" and "Odys- 
sey," and David from the Psalms. 

"I gaze aloof 
At the tissued roof, 

Where time and space are the warp and woof, 
Which the King of kings 
Like a curtain flings 
O'er the dreadfulness of eternal things. 

"If I could see 
As in truth they be, 
The glories that encircle me, 
I should lightly hold 
This tissued fold, 
With its marvellous curtain of blue and gold. 

"For soon the whole, 
Like a parched scroll, 
Shall before my amazed eyes uproll, 
And without a screen, 
At one burst be seen 
The Presence in which I have always been." 

(Whytehead.) 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies — 
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

(Tennyson.) 



94 PART IV: SOLUTION 

"Earth's crammed with heaven, 
And every common bush afire with God, 
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes; 
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries." 

(Mrs. Browning, "Aurora Leigh," Bk. vii.) 

"One impulse from a vernal wood 
May teach you more of man, 
Of moral evil and of good, 
Than all the sages can." 

(Wordsworth, "The Tables Turned.") 

" Our common daily life divine 
And every land a Palestine. 



The heavens are glassed in Merrimack, 
What more could Jordan render back? 

This maple ridge shall Horeb be, 
Yon green-banked lake our Galilee. 

Henceforth my heart shall sigh no more 
For olden time and holier shore; 
God's love and blessing then and there 
Are now and here and everywhere." 
(Whittier, "Chapel of the Hermits." See the whole poem.) 

Nature is so made as a counterpart to spiritual truths that almost every- 
thing is a type or illustration, or interpreter of the spiritual world. We can 
find "books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything." 

"How best unfold 
The secrets of another world 



By likening spiritual to corporeal forms, 
As may express them best ; though what if earth 
Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein 
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought." 
(Hugh Macmillan, "Bible Teachings in Nature," p. xviii.) 

It would be a good exercise to make a list of the object lessons from nature 
Jesus made use of, and of their teachings; and a similar list from the Psalms and 
Prophets. The preaching and teaching of Jesus is full of allusions to nature, 
to birds, plants, seeds, sheep, mountains, floods, fields, flowers, the seasons, 
storms, sunshine, sunsets. 



THE TRAINING OF FAITH 95 

"The flowers are the alphabet 
Of angels whereby 
They write on hills and fields 
Mysterious truths." 

The light speaks to us of God, the winds of the work of the Holy Spirit; the 
dawn is a prophecy of the millennium; the mountains tell us of the might of faith, 
the fading flowers of God's loving care; the stars point to the star of Bethlehem. 

Nature, being the work of the same God who gave Revelation, must be an 
interpreter of God and his Word. 

See Mrs. Gatty's "Parables from Nature." 

See Coleridge's "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni," ending: 

"Tell thou the silent sky, 
And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun, 
Earth with her thousand voices praises God." 

In the fifth place, the call to view nature drew Job out of himself 
and away from his troubles and cares. One of the first and best cures for the 
doubting, the sickly, the disconsolate, is to get their thoughts away from them- 
selves, to God, to helping others, to interest in the great universe of God, and the 
great work of redeeming the world into the kingdom of heaven. 

Note how the study of nature in science has lately furnished us with the one 
decisive proof that there is One God, and only one. 

In the sixth place, we see the double effect of this manifestation of 
God upon Job. (i) He learned to know God, in distinction from knowing 
about God. He had come close to God's heart. " Closer is he than breathing, 
nearer than hands and feet." (Tennyson, "The Higher Pantheism.") We all 
know the difference between knowing about a person, and knowing the person 
himself, coming into personal contact, feeling his friendship and love, entering 
into his feelings, and he into ours. Dr. Lyman Abbott illustrates the difference 
by contrasting an orphan who has heard about his father, and a child living in 
his father's home as a friend as well as a child. 

(2) He "abhorred himself and repented in dust and ashes." He was so 
ignorant, how could he challenge the goodness of the Wise God, of whose 
vast plane for Job, in this life and the next he could have little comprehension ? 
There is a striking passage in which a great philosopher, the famous Bishop 
Berkeley, describes the thought which occurred to him of the inscrutable schemes 
of Providence, as he saw in St. Paul's Cathedral a fly moving on one of the 
pillars. He says: "It requires some comprehension in the eye of an intelligent 
spectator to take in at one view the various parts of the building in order to 
observe their symmetry and design. But to the fly, whose prospect was con- 
fined to a little part of one of the stones of a single pillar, the joint beauty of the 
whole or the distant use of its parts, was inconspicuous. To that limited view, 



96 PART IV: SOLUTION 

the small irregularities on the surface of the hewn stone seemed to be so many 
deformed rocks and precipices." That fly on the pillar, of which the philosopher 
spoke, is the likeness of each human being as he creeps along the vast pillars 
which support the universe. (Dean Stanley.) 

Read Edward Everett Hale's story of Hands Off, in his "Christmas in a 
Palace," for one of the brightest and best illustrations of trusting to God's hands 
all the providences that come to us, even where they seem to be against us. It 
represents a man in another state of existence, looking down upon Joseph as 
he is in the hands of the Midianites. Being an active, ingenious young man, 
Joseph succeeded in escaping from his captors on the first night of his captivity, 
and had just reached the outer limits of the camp when a yellow dog barked, 
awakened his captors, and Joseph was returned to his captivity. But the on- 
looker wanted to interfere and kill the dog before he had awakened the camp. 
Then Joseph would have reached home in safety, and great sorrows have been 
avoided. But his guardian said, "Hands Off." And to let him see the evil of 
his interference, took him to a world where he could try his experiment. There 
he killed the dog. Joseph reached home in safety, his father rejoiced, his 
brothers were comforted. But when the famine came, there had been no Joseph 
to lay up the corn. Palestine and Egypt were starved. Great numbers died, 
and the rest were so weakened that they were destroyed by the savage Hittites. 
Civilization was destroyed. Egypt was blotted out. Greece and Rome remained 
in a barbarous state. The whole history of the world was changed, and count- 
less evils came because a man in his ignorant wisdom killed a dog and saved 
Joseph from present trouble to his future loss. 



PART V 

THE CONCLUSION. PROSE. 

(Chapter xli. 7-17.) 

FIFTH SOLUTION: THAT EVERY GOOD MAN'S LIFE 
IN THE END IS A SUCCESS. WITH GOD'S CHIL- 
DREN THERE ARE NO LIFE-TRAGEDIES. THERE 
ARE DRAMAS AND LYRIC SONGS AND EPICS, BUT 
NO TRAGEDIES 

RESEARCH QUESTIONS 

(To be assigned to different members of the class at the previous session, 
and for discussion in the class.) 

1. In what respects was Job right, so that he could receive the divine 
approval? 

2. For what were the three Friends censured by God? 

3. Why was a sacrifice required? 

4. What was there in Job's praying for his Friends that made it a fitting 
condition for his return to prosperity? 

5. What were the elements in Job's reward? 

6. Were the outward rewards a fitting conclusion of his career? 

7. What impression would they make upon the community? 

8. What is the place of material things in the rewards and fruits of 
a good life? 

9. What are the best rewards of virtue? 

10. The descriptions of heaven as bearing on this subject. 

11. Is there any difference in the teachings of the Old and the New Testa- 
ments upon this subject? 

12. What light does the life of Christ throw upon it? 



97 



98 PART V: CONCLUSION 



THE DIVINE APPROVAL OF JOB 

Job had come to that spiritual condition that made it right and wise to 
restore him to health and prosperity again. 

God commends Job for speaking that which was right concerning him. Not 
that every word was perfect, but his general position and attitude was the right 
one. He had kept his faith in God as just and good even when he could not see 
how his afflictions were right. The god against whom he had spoken was the 
false idea of God which his friends had presented as the true picture. Job 
rebelled against that picture as correct. But he was honest and loyal to the 
true God. He was a moral victor. 

The Three Friends were condemned because they had misrepresented 
God; they had been willing to be false to Job, and condemn God's child unjustly 
in order to defend God. They presented a false view of God's providential gov- 
ernment. They indeed said many good and true things, but their main defence 
of God was not right. 

A sacrifice was necessary as expressing the need of atonement for sin, and 
as a sign of their repentance. 

Job's captivity was turned when he prayed for his Friends. This 
showed (i) that he had forgiven them for all the hard words they had spoken 
about him, and the bitter burden they had added to his calamity; and (2) had 
gone out of himself in his interest for others. 

Both these were essential conditions of his restoration. He that will not 
forgive cannot be forgiven. And he that is self-centred would make a bad 
use of his relief from trouble. 

Thus Job was prepared for his new life, higher, nobler, richer than even his 
good life before his trial. 

THE FINAL OUTCOME 

The Facts.— The Epilogue states the final outcome of his trial so far as it 
was visible, "a living epistle known and read of all men." 

1. His friends were restored. They sympathized with him, and brought 
him aid to restore his lost fortunes: a piece of silver — an uncoined piece of 
unknown value — and a ring of gold, either an ornament, or more probably 
one of the rings which the Egyptians used for money. 

2. His property became double that which he had possessed before his 
affliction. 

3. He had the delight of children — seven sons and three daughters, whose 
names signified a Dove, Fragrant Cinnamon, and Cornucopia, a horn of 
plenty, expressing their attractive characters combined with rare beauty. He 
lived a long life, saw his descendants to the fourth generation. His life was 



FINAL OUTCOME 99 

" Rich in experience that angels might covet, 
Rich in a faith that had grown with the years." 

And Wordsworth's wish for his friend, 1 

"An old age serene and bright, 
And lovely as a Lapland night, 
Shall lead thee to thy grave," 
was fulfilled in Job. 

His sunset colors were more radiant than the noontide sun could give. 
They were like the gates of Paradise overarched with the rainbow of hope. 
The Greek Garden of the Hesperides was in the west. 

One thinks of Bunyan's Christian passing through the dark river with bands 
of welcoming angels waiting to greet him on the other side. 

This beautiful picture of Job's later life, the outcome of his sufferings, has 
been severely criticised as an unworthy ending of the poem, a descent from the 
climax of the drama, and therefore written by another hand than that of the 
great poet. 

But to my mind this ending is an essential element of the movement of the 
poem. It is the natural and proper cliniax of Job's life; and all feelings of its 
unworthiness arise from a misinterpretation of its significance. 

"When the Devil asked with a sneer, 'Doth Job fear God for nought?' he 
was looking at the matter only from the Devil's standpoint — that of selfishness. 
But it was true, in a way, that the Devil and those who serve him cannot under- 
stand that Job did not fear God for nought, nor has any one ever served and 
feared God for nought. The returns from God's service are bigger and better 
than all that any competing employer has to offer." 

First. We must keep clearly in mind the distinction between the rewarding 
results which follow and grow out of a right course of action and wages which 
are sought and received for performing that action. The promise is that to those 
who seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness "all these things shall 
be added," and the whole history of Christian civilization is an illustration and 
confirmation. But those who seek first, chiefly, "all these things," do not 
belong to the Kingdom of God. What they get they get as wages, as gifts to 
draw them to better things, not as fruits, and they fail of the best. The two 
characters are entirely different. One will do right whatever the consequences; 
the other is merely seeking something to his own advantage. 

The results do not follow in each individual case immediately, or the temp- 
tation would be too great to forget the right doing in the presence of the reward. \ 
But as a whole, to the community, they do follow. 

Professor Miinsterberg, in "The Americans," states the case clearly: "The 
American merchant works for money in exactly the sense that a great painter 

1 "To a Young Lady." 

LOFC, 



IOO PART V: A GOOD LIFE 

works for money; the high price which is paid for his picture is a very welcome 
indication of the general appreciation of his art; but he would never get this 
appreciation if he were working for the money instead of his artistic ideals." 
(P. 238.) 

"In the United States wealth has great significance only because it is felt 
to measure the individual's successful initiative. ... He wishes in this way to 
express the fact that he has passed life's examinations well, that he has been 
enterprising, and has won the respect of those around him." (P. 240.) 

The Outlook for July 29, 1905, in an article on " Teachers' Salaries," ex- 
presses the same distinction in this way: 

"It is not desirable that either the Church or the State should bid against 
industrial enterprises — and for a very simple reason. A man may be a success- 
ful leader of industry who measures its success by the pecuniary reward it 
gives to him; but no man can be a successful soldier, or statesman, or teacher, 
or preacher who adopts any such standard. No one wishes to see such pecuniary 
rewards offered by the civil service, the school, or the Church as will entice into 
it men chiefly by hope of pecuniary reward. No one supposes that Henry 
Ward Beecher ought to have received as preacher and lecturer an income 
five times as great as he did receive, because as a jury lawyer he would easily 
have made that amount; no one wishes to see the Nation paying to Mr. Root 
as Secretary of State an income approximating that which he surrendered when 
he became Secretary of State. But just because the teacher, the preacher, and 
the publicist should be enabled to dismiss financial considerations and devote 
themselves wholly to the service to which the public calls them, the public should 
furnish an income on which they can live with comfort and dignity." 

President Roosevelt in a late address made the same distinction. 

Now the reward of Job was of the better and nobler kind. It was the right 
and noble fruit of an entirely disinterested course of life which sought the highest 
things without looking for reward. 

Second. The outward prosperity which came to Job after his victory in 
his great trial was the symbol and visible expression of the spiritual results, 
the nobler character, the larger love, the firmer faith, which were the real 
rewards. 

If Job had been left a poor, lonely, broken down old man, to wear out his 
life in a weary struggle with want, though he became a saint as holy as the 
seraphim the result of his trial and of the teaching would have been obscured, 
both to his neighbors and to the world ever since. 

Heaven with all its outward glories, and not hell, is the fitting environment 
for the eternal abode of those who have the heavenly spirit and life. If one 
seeks merely a heavenly place — the golden streets, the river of peace flowing 
among fruit trees, the emerald bow about the throne, the jewelled walls and 
gates of pearl — he is not seeking heaven, nor on the way to heaven, nor can he 
get there by that road. 



ALWAYS A SUCCESS IOI 

"Who seeks for heaven alone to save his soul 
May keep the path, but will not reach the goal. 
While he who walks in love may wander far, 
Yet God will bring him where the blessed are." 

(Anon.) 

Whoever really seeks heaven seeks after the heavenly character, the heavenly 
life; seeks to live according to the beatitudes, the life of love, the fruits of the 
spirit, the life of doing good, the life which Jesus lived, all the things which 
make heaven what it is. The outward glories are the expression and fitting 
environment of the heavenly spirit. That is the real meaning of our songs of 
heaven, our "glory songs." Says Dr. Robert E. Speer: 

" It would be as sensible to tell a mariner to stop thinking about his port, and 
just steer any way, only so he went straight for the moment, as to bid us stop 
living with reference to the heaven we are bound for." 

Third. The need of this outward expression and fitting environment is 
seen on every hand as we would persuade men to live the religious life. Men 
are repelled by what they regard the gloominess of the Christian life. A late 
writer voices his antipathy to what he pictures as the Puritan forefathers' heaven, 
"a place of ages of psalm-singing, of harp-playing, of praise." The repellent 
dulness of the conception of goodness by not a few is pictured by the London 
preacher's story of the little girl who asked her father if he did not think that 
when she got to heaven, if she was real good and played with the angels all the 
morning, the Lord would let her have a little devil to play with in the afternoon. 
So, too, Rasselas, wishing to escape from the Happy Valley; and Professor 
James's first experience of Chautauqua, as given in his recent book, " Talks to 
Teachers on Psychology," pp. 268-75. 

The heathen nations are willing to listen with greater interest to appeals from 
Christian nations because they see what Christianity has done for them. 

Suppose we make two maps of the world, on the plan furnished by the 
United States census, to show the degree in which ignorance, certain diseases, 
and many other things prevail, by means of lighter and darker shades. On 
one map we will note the countries where the purest Christianity prevails, by 
white. A darker shade will mark the more imperfect forms, and then let the 
shades grow darker and darker through Mohammedanism and the various 
forms of heathenism, till we come to the blackness of the lowest fetichism. 

Then, with entire independence, make a similar map of the moral and 
intellectual condition of men. Where there is the most manhood, the noblest 
womanhood, the highest morality, the most of all that elevates the people, and 
brings the greatest happiness, these put in white, darken the shades as these 
things grow less, till we come to the blackness of the lowest savagery. 

Bring the two maps together and they will exactly coincide. Where there 
is the most Christianity there will be the most of all that is good for man. 



102 PART V: A GOOD LIFE 

It is inconceivable that the good God should make a world the laws of which 
were not beautiful and beneficent to all who obey them. And this is well, 
because the material blessings which flow from obedience become the means 
and instruments for the service of God and man. They help to hasten "the 
Good Time Coming." 

Fourth. Both the Old Testament and the New teach this doctrine of the 
final outcome of right character. 

The Old Testament is full of it. See Deuteronomy and the Prophets and 
the Wisdom Literature. 

And it is not a worn-out dogma of the dead Past. With larger emphasis 
on the spiritual and eternal rewards Christ teaches the same truth and makes the 
same promises. Look at his list of seven rewards he promises to those who 
overcome. (Rev. ii, iii.) 

Heaven, a holy but also a beautiful heaven, is placed at the end of the Bible 
as the final consummation. 

The same is true of the ideal man, Jesus Christ himself, "who for the joy 
that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down 
at the right hand of the throne of God." (Heb. xii. 2.) 

We are apt to look at the cross as the ultimate end of Jesus, or to dwell on 
it so much that we forget his ascension, his glorious appearance as revealed in 
Revelation, as King of Kings, and Lord of Lords, reigning in unspeakable 
glory. All this is absolutely unselfish and therefore divine. 

Fifth. Let us look at the real rewards which crowned Job's victory in his 
long trial. 

(1) He received a great and blessed development of character. He entered 
the higher ranges and visions of goodness and faith and love. His eyes were 
opened like those of Elisha's servant to see truths and enjoy experiences which 
never entered even his dreams before. His spiritual experience was like Jacob's 
ladder by which he climbed nearer to heaven and to God. 

"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, 
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made." 

(Edmund Waller, "Verses upon his Divine Poesy.") 

The greatest reward of goodness is more goodness, of love is more love, of 
faith is a fuller trust. 

"To each of us all there will come an hour 
When the tree of life shall burst into flower, 
And rain at our feet a glorious dower 
Of something greater than ever we knew." 

Some one has said: "It is true that troubles never come singly, but in a 
better sense than is usually meant by that phrase. No consignment of trouble 



ALWAYS A SUCCESS 103 

is ever sent to us by itself. By the same messenger there comes a consignment of 
special strength to bear that trouble — and the strength-package is always a 
little larger than the trouble-package." But more than strength come disci- 
pline, growth, largei vision, nearness to God, power to help others, purer liv- 
ing, deeper thinking — all come with trouble, if we will receive them. 

Compare Milton's experience after his blindness came, as interpreted by 
Elizabeth Lloyd: 

"O Merciful One! Thy glorious face 

Is leaning toward me, and its holy light 
Shines in upon my lonely dwelling-place 
And there is no night. 

"Oh, I seem to stand 

Trembling where foot of mortal ne'er hath been, 
Wrapped in the radiance of thy sinless land 
Which eye hath never seen. 

"Visions come and go, 

Shapes of resplendent beauty round me throng, 
From angel lips I seem to hear the flow 
Of soft and holy song. 

"It is nothing now — 

When heaven is ripening on my sightless eyes 
When airs from Paradise refresh my brow — 
That earth in darkness lies. 

"In a purer clime 

My being fills with rapture; waves of thought 
Roll in upon my spirit, strains sublime 
Break over me unsought." 

(2) Job received such prosperity as expressed God's approval and could 
be seen and recognized by men, a symbol for them of his inner experience. 

(3) J OD received in his soul increased power of helpfulness and usefulness. 
As Paul says to the Corinthians: "The God of all comfort . . . comforteth 
us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort them that are in any 
affliction, through the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God." 
(2 Cor. i. 4.) 

And more than this, his increased prosperity under this new inspiration 
increased his power of helping others. The adding of 7000 sheep to his pre- 
vious 7000 added nothing whatever to his personal enjoyment, any more than 
another million added to the millionaire's dollars increases his happiness. But 
the doubling of his property gave additional power of usefulness; put a better 



104 PART V: A GOOD LIFE 

instrument for doing good into his hands. That is what the right character 
can do with all the material things which so often tempt us to evil. God does 
not ask us to exterminate them, but to transform them into instruments of 
blessing, as the inner light in Goethe's "Tale of Tales" transformed the rude 
log hut of the fisherman into an exquisitely wrought temple of solid silver. 

Job lives in the lives of those he has comforted, and has a part in the better- 
ment of millions of lives all down the ages. 

(4) Job's reward was perfected in eternal life. In the Septuagint version, 
made some two centuries before Christ, "we find a clause added that strikes 
another key, hints that we have before us only the first scenes in a drama not 
yet played out, only the first stages of the endless life. — 'And it is written that 
he will rise again with those whom the Lord raiseth up.' " 

"And when these earthly years are past and gone, 
Temptation's battle fought, the victory won, 
From heaven shall gently come this message down, 
They that have borne the cross shall wear a crown 
Never to fade." 



"If thou wilt be a hero, and wilt strive 
To help thy fellow and exalt thyself, 
Thy feet, at last, shall stand on jasper floors; 
Thy heart, at last, shall seem a thousand hearts — 
Each single heart with myriad raptures filled — 
While thou shalt sit with princes and with kings, 
Rich in the jewel of a ransomed soul." 

A German writer illustrates the greatness of our salvation after this manner: 
A gentleman, after the most exemplary life, died. The gate of heaven was 
opened, and he was welcomed as an heir of glory. One of the glorious ones 
was commissioned to be his conductor and teacher. First he took him to a 
point where he could see the most fearful representation of sin, in its fruits of 
misery. The objects of horror made him shudder. Then his guide bade him 
look farther and farther down in the dismal vault, and he saw the most hideous 
and terrible of beings, the fruit of sin. "That," said his guide, "is what in the 
ages of eternity you would have been had you gone on in sin." His guide next 
took him to a point from which could be seen the glories of the redeemed. He 
saw rank after rank of angels, seraphim, and cherubim, dwelling in ineffable 
glory. He bade him look beyond these; and in the far distance he beheld a 
being transcendently more radiant and glorious, around whom floated the soft 
music of unspeakable sweetness and joy. "That" said the guide, "is yourself 
many ages hence. Behold the glory and bliss to which the salvation of Jesus 
will bring you." 

See the hymn " For all the saints who from their labors rest." 



ALWAYS A SUCCESS 105 

See Archbishop Trench's poem beginning "I say to thee, do thou repeat," 
and ending, " That this is blessing, this is life." 

Dr. Samuel Cox closes his noble book on Job with these words: 

" Whoever has learned to see in suffering a proof of God's love, and beyond 
the darkness of death a land of light, in which all wrongs shall be redressed, 
and all virtue meet its due reward — a land, in fine, in which the varied discipline 
of this world shall issue in a life conformed to its fair and high ideal, and cherished 
by all happy and auspicious conditions — he has a solution of the great Problem 
in which he may rest and rejoice." 

We may well sum up the impressions the book has left upon us in the ascrip- 
tion which Blake has engraved above the final plate of his noble "Inventions 
of Job." 

" Great and Marvellous are Thy Works, Lord God Almighty; 
Just and True are Thy Ways, O Thou King of Saints." 

" Ye have heard of the Patience of Job, and have seen the end of the 
Lord, how that the Lord is full of pity and merciful." (James v. 1.) 



I 



INDEXES 

I 

GENERAL INDEX 

PAGE 

Absentee God: Teufelsdrockh's 92 

Age and Date of the Book of Job xxiv 

Author of the Book of Job xxiv 

Avenger, The: a Necessity 60 

Beecher, Rev. Henry Ward; A Story of His Trial . . . 31 

Bibliography xi 

Bildad 23, 24 

Bishop of London, Anecdote of the 58 

Blackboard Designs vii 

Cain Fleeing Before the Eye of God 61 

Characteristics of Job's Three Friends 24 

Character of Job 3 

Commentaries on the Book of Job . . . . . xi 

Comparisons of the Book of Job with Other Literature . . xii 

Composition of the Book of Job Compared with that of Homer xxii 

Composition of the Book of Job, Method of . xxi 

Conclusion 97 

Conscience, The 61 

Conscience, The, Entangled with the Nervous System . . 17 

Courage 27 

Courage, Tests of 27 

Daysman, The 35 

Debate: Resultant of the First Colloquy 37 



108 INDEXES 

PAGE 

Debate: Resultant of the Second Colloquy 49 

Debate, The Great: The Audience 25 

Diagrams xxviii, xxix, 2, 21, 65 

Discussion Between Job and His Friends 20 

Discussion, Outcome of the 56 

Discussion, Scene of the 22 

Disease of Job 10 

Does God Send Trouble? 14 

Elihu, Introduction of 66 

Elihu's Speech. Diagram 65 

Elihu's Speech, Outcome of 71 

Eliphaz 23, 24 

Epic of the Inner Life, The xx 

Evil: God Controls and Limits Its Power 15 

Evil, Why God Permits 15 

Everlasting No, The . . . . . . ... . 56 

Everlasting Yea, The 57 

Exile of the Jews, A Lesson from 76 

Eye-ointment in the Arabian Nights 74 

Fly on St. Paul's Cathedral 95 

Friends, The Three; Meeting with Job 23 

General View of the Book of Job. Diagram . . . xxviii 

God Is Good and Just in Spite of Evil 56 

God, Relation of, to Trouble 14 

Good Man's Life a Success, Every 97 

Goodness, A Test of the Reality of 17 

Gyges' Ring, Story of 17 

"Hands Off," E. E. Hale's Story of . . . . . .96 

Hebrew Poetry xix 

Historical Basis of the Book of Job 1 

Horeb's Rock, Elijah on • . . . . 85 



INDEXES 109 



PAGE 



Intervention of Elihu 64 

Job at Home; Scene 1 3 

Job, Book of, A Dramatic Poem Framed in an Epic Story . . xviii 

Age and Date of xxiv 

An Epic of the Inner Life xx 

Author of the xxiv 

Commentaries on xi 

Comparison of, with Other Literature xii 

Composition, Method of xxi 

Composition of, Compared with that of Homer . . . xxii 

General View of xxviii 

Historical Basis of 1 

Literary Form of xvii 

Methods of Teaching viii 

Monographs on xii 

Persons and Scenes xxix 

Relation to Other Scriptures xxv 

Structure of xxvi 

Unity and Method of Composition xxi 

Job, Character of 3 

Job, Divine Approval of 98 

Job, Land of 3 

Job on the Ash-mound n 

Job, Patience of . 26 

Job Stood the Test . . 8 

Job's Captivity Turned 98 

Job's Disease 10 

Job's Lamentation 25 

Job's Later Life, A Beautiful Picture of 99 

Job's Oath of Clearing 54 

Job's Review of His Life 54 

Job's Soliloquy 53 

Job's Wife 12 

Judging Others, Tendency to 58 



HO INDEXES 



PAGE 



Lament of Job 25 

Lamps in the Tomb of Terentia 73 

Land of Job 3 

Laws of Nature, God Uses the 16 

Light as a Symbol of God 84 

Literary Form of the Book of Job xvii 

Longfellow's Letter About His "Tales of the Wayside Inn" . xvii 

Meine Trubsal War Mein Gliick 71 

Methods of Teaching Job viii 

Miracles and the Laws of Nature 16 

Oath of Clearing, by Job 54 

Organized Classes vii 

Patience of Job 26 

Persons and Scenes. Diagram xxix 

Plan of the Discussion. Diagram 21 

Plato on Punishment and Suffering 61 

Plutarch, " On the Delay of Divine Justice" . . . .61 

Problem of Suffering: Second Solution 58 

Problem, The, of the Book of Job xv 

Problem, The Universal xvi 

"Prometheus Bound" Compared with Job 56 

Prosperity the Fitting Outward Expression of Virtue . .101 

Quarry for the Temple 73 

Readings in Character vii 

Redeemer, My 46 

Relation of the Book of Job to Other Scriptures . . . xxv 

Retzsch's Picture, The Game of Chess 91 

Review of His Life, Job's 54 

Satan, the Adversary 6 

Scenes in Chapters I and II. Diagram 2 



INDEXES HI 



PAGE 



School of Life, Exercises in the 71 

School of Life, Lessons in the . . . . . . . 13 

Shekinah, the Visible Expression of God 84 

Silence, Seven Days of 23 

Solution of the Problem, First 1, 17 

Solution of the Problem, Second 20, 58 

Solution of the Problem, Third 64, 71 

Solution of the Problem, Fourth 79, 89 

Solution of the Problem, Fifth 97 

Sons of God 6 

Sons of God in Council 5 

Storm Preparing for the Voice of God 80 

Story of the Best Possible World 73 

Structure of the Book of Job xxvi 

Suffering a Discipline 71 

Suffering Sometimes the Fruit and Punishment of Sin . . 59 

Ta Pathemata Mathemata 71 

Tendency to Misjudge Ourselves 59 

Theophany, The 84 

Three Friends, Characteristics of the 24 

Titbottom's Spectacles, Mr 18 

Treasuries of the Snow 88 

Tribulation 72 

Trouble a Test for Others . .18 

Trouble a Test to the Sufferer 17 

Trouble, God's Relation to 14 

Trouble Sometimes an Insoluble Mystery . . . . 79, 89 

Unity and Method of Composition of the Book of Job . . xxi 

Unseen World, The. Scene 2 5 

Uz, Ash-mound Outside of the Walls of 11 

Versions of the Book of Job viii 

Virtue, The True Rewards of 99 



H2 INDEXES 

PAGE 

Vision of the Future Life, A German Writer's . . . .104 
Voice of God from the Whirlwind 79, 85 

Whirlwind as a Symbol of God 84 

Wife of Job 12 

Zophar 23, 24 



II 

REFERENCES TO LITERATURE 

^Eschylus: "Prometheus Bound" 56 

Ancient Classics for English Readers: "iEschylus" . . .22 

Bassi, Ugo: "Sermon in the Hospital" 74 

Bradford, Amory H., D.D.: "Messages of the Masters" . . 88 

Browning, E. B.: "Aurora Leigh" 94 

"The Cry of the Human" .... 13 

Browning, Robert: "Pippa Passes" 62 

Burr, E. F., D.D.: "Ecce Ccelum" 88 

Bushnell: "Moral Uses of Dark Things" 74 

Byron: "The Giaour" 61 

Caine, Hall: "The Bondman" 62 

Carlyle: "Heroes and Hero-worship" 5 

"Sartor Resartus" 56, 57 

Coleridge: "Ancient Mariner" 42 

"Fear in Solitude" . . . . . . .92 

"Hymn Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni" . 95 

"Hymn to Mont Blanc" 88 

Cook, Joseph, D.D.: "Monday Lectures: Conscience" . . 63 

Curtis, George William: "Prue and I" 18 

Drummond, Prof. Henry: "The Programme of Christianity" . 60 



INDEXES 113 



PAGE 



Fletcher, Miss: Poem 58 

Foster: "Cyclopedia of Poetical Illustrations" .... 90 

Gatty, Mrs.: "Parables from Nature" 95 

Giberne, Agnes: "The Stars" 88 

Goethe: "Tale of Tales" 104 

Hale, E. E., D.D.: "Christmas in a Palace" .... 96 

Story by 93 

Hall, Charles Cuthbert: "Does God Send Trouble?" . 40, 60 

Havergal: "Kept for the Master's Use" 59 

Hawthorne: "Mosses from an Old Manse" .... 62 

Heber, Bishop Reginald: Hymn 14 

Herodotus 66 

Holmes, O. W.: "After the Fire" 59 

"The Chambered Nautilus" . . . .77 

Homer: "Iliad" 34 

Hugo, Victor: "La Conscience" 61 

Huxley, Prof.: "Lay Sermons" 91 

Jacox: "Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts" ... 24 

James, Prof.: "Talks to Teachers on Psychology" . . 76, 101 

Johnson: "Rasselas" 76, 101 

Lloyd, Elizabeth: "Verses on Milton's Blindness" . . . 103 

Longfellow: "Birthday of Agassiz" ...... 92 

"Ladder of St. Augustine" . . . . 75,76 

"Resignation" 89 

Lowell: "On the Death of a Friend's Child" .... 74 

Lyte, Henry F.: Poem 85 

Mackay, Charles: Poem 74 

MacMillan, Hugh: "Bible Teachings in Nature" . . 88, 94 

McCook, H. C: "The Gospel in Nature" 88 

Mill, John Stuart 91 



H4 INDEXES 

PAGE 

Milton: "Lycidas" 26 

"Paradise Lost" 7 

"Samson Agonistes" 22 

Moore, Thomas: "Lalla Rookh" 75 

Miinsterberg, Prof.: "The Americans" 99 

Newton, John: Hymn 17 

Omar Khayyam: "Rubaiyat" xv, xvi 

Peloubet, F. N.: "Loom of Life" 61, 74 

Plato: "Republic" . . 17, 61 

Plutarch: "On the Delay of Divine Justice" .... 61 

Pope: "Moral Essays" 4 

Proctor, Adelaide: "The Comforter" 23 



Rogers: "Grey son Letters" 17 

Ruskin: "Modern Painters" 82, 88 



Scott: "Marmion" ... - 83 

Shakespeare: "Hamlet" 4 

"Julius Caesar" 4 

"King John" 26, 42 

"King Lear" 7 

"Macbeth" 31, 62 

"Much Ado About Nothing" . . . 27, 42 

"Othello" . 38 

"Richard II" 26 

"Richard III" 46, 62 

"Snowflakes" 88 

Sophocles: "Antigone" 26 

"CEdipus Colonnus" 26 

"Stars and the Earth, The" 88 



INDEXES 115 

PAGE 

Tennyson: "Flower in the Crannied Wall" 93 

"In Memoriam" . . 4 •'. . 37> 57> 75> 9 1 

"The Higher Pantheism" 95 

"To J. S." 23 

Trench, Archbishop: Poem 105 

"Study of Words" 72 

Twombly, A. S., D.D.: "The Choir Boy of York Cathedral". 73 

"Uplands of God" 62 

Van Dyke, Henry, D.D.: "The Open Door" .... 16 

Waller, Edmund: "Verses upon His Divine Poesy" . . . 102 

Whittier: "Chapel of the Hermits" 94 

"Ezekiel" 61 

"Gone" 4 

"The Eternal Goodness" 90 

Whytehead: Poem 93 

Willis, N. P.: "Parrhasius" 62 

Wither, George: Poem 72 

Wordsworth: "Excursion" 38 

"Scorn Not the Sonnet" 74 

"The Tables Turned" 94 

"To a Young Lady" 99 

Wright, Lewis: "Light" 84 

Xavier: Hymn 18 



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